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ENNYSON 



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BY 



STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A. 






r,. p. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK LONDON 

27 WEST TWSNTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 

1894 






Copyright, 1894 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



Electrotyped. Printed, and Bound by 

Ubc Itnicfcerbocher press, "ftcw Ifforft 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 

I. Tennyson as an Artist . 
II. His Relation to Christianity . 
III. His Relation to Social Politics 

CHAP. 

I. The Poems of 1830 . 

n. The Poems of 1833 . 

in. The Poems of 1842 . 

IV. 'The Classical and Romantic Poems of 

1842 WITH the later Classical Poems 

V. The Princess 

VI. The Princess {Cont.) — The Woman's 

Question 

VII. In Memoriam 

VIII. In Memoriam (Cont.) — Its Structure 
IX. Maud and the War-Poems 

X. Idylls of the King 

The Coming of Arthur .... 
Gareth and Lynette .... 



PAGE 
I 

2 
13 
31 

49 
73 
93 

no 

145 

169 

188 

212 
229 

259 
268 

275 



IV 



Contents 



X. Idylls of the King — (Cont.) 

The Marriage of Geraint ^ 

Geraint and Enid \ 

Balin and Balan 

Merlin and Vivien . 

Lancelot and Elaine 

The Holy Grail 

Pelleas and Ettarre 

The Last Tournament 

Lancelot 

Guinevere 

The Passing of Arthur 
XL Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 
XII. Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 
XIIL The Dramatic Monologues 
XIV. Speculative Theology . 

XV. The Nature-Poetry 
XVI. The Later Poems 
Index 



291 
298 
312 
319 

341 

350 
357 
370 
392 
412 

431 
448 
469 

487 




TENNYSON 

HIS ART AND RELATION TO 
MODERN LIFE 






TENNYSON. 



INTRODUCTION. 



THE death of Tennyson was worthy of his life. He 
died with the simplicity which marked his life, and 
yet with a certain conscious stateliness which was 
all his own ; and these two, simplicity and stateliness, 
were also vital in the texture of his poetry. But his 
dying hour, though it has left a noble picture on the 
mind of England, is not the important thing. His life 
and poetry are the real matter of use and interest, and 
his death gains its best import from its being the beau- 
tiful and fitting end of all the work that had gone before 
it. It became an artist, it became a Christian, it became 
a man. To these three points this Introduction is dedi- 
cated — to his relation to beauty, to his relation to the 
Christian faith, and to his relation to the movement of hu- 
manity. The art of his poems, his work on nature and 
his work on human life, as far as this immense subject 

I 



2 Tennyson 

can be compressed into a few hundred pages, will be 
treated of in the rest of this book. For more than sixty 
years he practised his art, and his practice of it, being 
original and extraordinarily careful and self-respecting, 
suggests and comments on almost every question that 
concerns the art of poetry. For more than sixty years 
he lived close to the present Ufe of England, as far as 
he was capable of comprehending and sympathising with 
its movements ; and he inwove what he felt concerning 
it into his poetry. For many years to come that poetry 
— so close to modern life — will open a vast storehouse 
of subjects to those writers who are interested in the 
application of imaginative emotion to the problems and 
pleasures of life. Half at least of those problems and 
pleasures eluded Tennyson, or he did not see them. 
But he felt the other half all the more strongly, and he 
felt it for this long period of sixty years. He then who 
writes on Tennyson has so wide a country over which 
to travel, that he cannot do much more than visit it here 
and there. When he has finished his journey, he knows 
how much he has left unseen, untouched ; how much 
more of pleasure and good he will gain in many more 
journeys over this varied, home-like, and romantic land. 



Tennyson as an Artist. — The first characteristic of 

Tennyson's art — that is, of his shaping of the beauty 
which he saw in Nature and Humanity — was simplicity, 
and this came directly out of his character. The 



Introduction 



way in which he worked, his choice of subjects, his 
style, were all the revelation of a character drawn on 
large and uncomplicated lines ; and in this sense, in 
the complete sincerity to his inner being of all he did 
and in the manner of its doing, he was simple in the 
truest sense of the word. Nothing was ever done for 
effect ; no subject in which he was not veritably involved 
was taken up. Nothing was even tried, save a few metri- 
cal exercises, for experiment's sake alone, much less to 
please the popular moment. The thing shaped was the 
legitimate child of natural thought and natural feeling. 
Vital sincerity or living correspondence between idea 
and form, that absolute necessity for all fine art as for 
all noble life, was his, and it is contained in what I have 
called his simplicity. 

His clearness is also contained in this simplicity — 
clearness in thought, in expression, and in representa- 
tion of the outward world, one of the first and greatest 
things an artist can attain. It is true that Tennyson 
never went down into the obscure and thorny depths of 
metaphysics and theology ; it is true that he did not at- 
tempt to express the more dreadful and involved passions 
of mankind, such as Shakespeare in his Tragic worked 
upon, nor the subtle and distant analogies and phases 
of human nature in which Browning had his pleasure. 
It was easy, then, it may be said, for him to be clear. 
But I think it was not from inability to try these sub- 
jects that he did not write about them, but from delib- 
erate choice not to write about that which he could not 



Tennyson 



express with lucidity of thought and form. He deter- 
mined to be clear. He chose plain and easy lines of 
thought in philosophy and theology, but he expressed 
them with art — that is, in beautiful form proceeding out- 
wards from impassioned feeling ; and a poem like The 
Two Voices or Out of the Deep is an instance of the way 
this was done. The same choice of the easy to be un- 
derstood presided over his human subjects. For the 
most part he wrote of the everyday loves and duties of 
men and women ; of the primal pains and joys of hu- 
manity ; of the aspirations and trials which are com- 
mon to all ages and all classes and independent even 
of the disease of civilisation ; but he made them new 
and surprising by the art which he added to them — 
by beauty of thought, tenderness of feeling, and ex- 
quisiteness of shaping. The main lines of the subjects, 
even of the classical subjects, are few, are simple, are clear. 
And I think all the more that this choice of clearness 
(of clearness as a part of simplicity) was deliberate, be- 
cause of his representation of Nature. It is plain that 
he might have entered into infinite and involuted de- 
scription ; that he could, if he pleased, have expressed 
the stranger and remoter aspects of Nature, for he had 
an eye to see everything from small to large. But he 
selected the simple,' the main lines of a landscape or an 
event of Nature, and rejected the minuter detail or the 
obscurer relations between the parts of that which he 
described. What was done was done in the fewest 
words possible, and with luminous fitness of phrase. 



Introduction 5 

English literature owes him gratitude for this clear- 
ness. At a time when we are running close to the edge 
of all the errors of the later Elizabethans, Tennyson 
never allowed himself to drift into obscurity of thought 
or obscurity of expression, and showed (as those did not 
who restored clearness to English song in the time of 
Dryden) that simplicity of words, as well as jewelled 
brightness of thought and description, might be also 
compact of imagination. The lamp of language which 
he held in his hand burnt with a bright, keen, and glow- 
ing flame. The debt we owe Tennyson for this is not 
owed by English literature alone ; it is personal also. 
Every writer should acknowledge the debt and follow 
the example. Clearness in thought and words ought to 
be a part of a writer's religion ; it is certainly a neces- 
sary part of his morality. Nay, to follow clearness like 
a star, clearness of thought, clearness of phrase, in every 
kind of life, is the duty of all. But the poets are most 
bound to feel and fulfil that duty, and it is not one of 
the least which belong to their art and their influence. 
Tennyson felt it and fulfilled it. 

One other thing I may briefly add to these judgments 
concerning his simplicity. It is that (after his very earli- 
est work) his stuff is of almost an equal quality through- 
out. I do not mean that all the poems are equally good, 
but that the web on which their pattern was woven kept, 
with but a few exceptions, the same closeness and fine- 
ness throughout. The invention, the pictures, the 
arrangement, and the colouring of the things wrought 



Tennyson 



on the web were variable in excellence, but the stuff 
was uniform. This is an excessively rare excellence in 
a poet, and it continued to the close. The workman- 
ship is curiously level from youth to age ; and that kind J 
of simplicity has also its root in character. ^ 

Mingled with this simplicity, which was due to the 
unconscious entrance of his character into his art, there 
was also in all his poetry, as I have said with regard to 
his death, a certain stateliness entirely conscious of itself, 
and arising out of a reverence for his own individuality. 
The personality of Tennyson, vividly conscious of itself 
and respecting itself, pervades his poetry, is part of his 
art, and gives it part of its power. I have called it self- 
respecting to distinguish it from the personality of those 
poets who, like Byron, spread out their personality be- 
fore us, but whom we cannot suspect of reverencing 
themselves. " Reverencing themselves " seems an in- 
vidious term, but in the case of poets like Tennyson, 
and there is a distinct class of such poets, it means that 
they look upon themselves as prophets, as endowed with 
power to proclaim truth and beauty, as consecrated to 
do work which will delight, console, and exalt mankind. 
It is, then, rather their high vocation which they rever- j 
ence than anything in themselves ; and this bestows on 
all their work that stateliness which is self-conscious, as 
it were, in all their poems. They are never seen in un- 
dress, never without their singing and prophetic robes, 
never unattended by one or other of the graver Muses. 

We have had two great examples of this type of poet 



1 



Introduction 7 



in the past. Milton was one, Wordsworth was another. 
Milton never moved his verse unconscious of Urania by 
his side. Wordsworth never lost the sense that he was a 
consecrated spirit, ^ nd Tenny s on nev er forgot thatjhg^ 
poet's work was to convince the world of love and 
beauty ; that he was born to do that work, and to do it 
worthily. This is an egotism (if we choose to give it 
that term) which is charged with power and with fire. 
Any individuality, conscious of itself, respecting itself 
because of its faith in a sacred mission entrusted to it, 
and beneath which it may not fall without dishonour, 
lifts and kindles other individualities, and exalts their 
views of human life. It does this work with tenfold 
greater force when it is in a poet, that is, in one who 
adds to its moral force the all-subduing power of beauty. 
This conviction, which cannot belong to a weak poet, 
but does (when it is consistent throughout life) belong 
to poets whose nature is hewn out of the living rock, en- 
ters as stateliness into all their verse, gives it a moral 
virtue, a spiritual strength, and emerges in a certain 
grandeur or splendour of style, more or less fine as the 
character is more or less nobly mixed. This sense of 
the relation the poet bears to mankind, this sense he has 
of his office and of the duty it imposes on him, was pro- 
foundly felt by Tennyson, became a part of him as an 
artist, and was an element in every line he wrote. Per- 
sonal it was, but it was personal for the sake of human- 
ity ; and dignity, stateliness in subjects, in thoughts and 
in style, issued naturally from that conviction. 



8 Tennyson 



These are things which belong to a poet's art, but by 
themselves they would not, of course, make him an 
artist. The essential difference of an artist is love of 
beauty and the power of shaping it. The greatness of 
an artist is proportionate to the depth and truth of his 
love of beauty ; to his faithfulness to it, and to his un- 
remitting effort to train his natural gift of shaping it into 
fuller ease, power, and permanence. As to beauty itself, 
men talk of natural beauty, of physical, moral, and spirit- 
ual beauty, and these term-divisions have their use ; but 
at root all beauty is one, and these divided forms of it 
are modes only of one energy, conditioned by the ele- 
ments through which it passes. They can all pass into 
one another, and they can all be expressed in terms of 
one another. 

To define, then, what beauty is in itself is beyond our 
power, but we can approach a definition of it by mark- 
ing out clearly its results on us. What is always true of 
beauty is this, that, wherever it appears, it awakens love 
of it which has no return on self, but which bears us out 
of ourselves ; it stirs either joy or reverence in the heart 
without bringing with it any self-admiration or vanity ; 
and it kindles the desire of reproducing it, not that we 
may exult in our own skill in forming it, but that our 
reproduction of it may awaken emotions in others simi- 
lar to those which the original sight of beauty stirred in 
our own heart — that is, it more or less forces the seer of it 
into creation. This creation, this representation of the 
beautiful, is art ; and the most skilful representation of 



Introduction 



the ugly — that is, of anything which awakens either re- 
pulsion, or base pleasure, or horror which does not set 
free and purify the soul, or scorn instead of reverence, 
or which does not kindle in us the desire of reproduc- 
tion of it that we may stir in others similar emotions to 
our own — is not art at all. It is clever imitation, it is 
skill, it is artifice, it is not art. It is characteristic of an 
age which is writhing under the frivolous despotism of 
positive science that the accurate and skilful representa- 
tion of things and facts which are not beautiful is called 
art ; and it belongs to all persons who care for the 
growth of humanity, not to denounce this error, for de- 
nunciation is barren of results, but to live and labour for 
the opposite truth. Far more rests on that effort than 
men imagine. A third at least of the future betterment 
of mankind, to which we now look forward with more 
hope than we have done for years, depends on this ef- 
fort, on all that it involves, on all that it will create in 
the imaginative and spiritual life of the human race. 

With a few exceptions, into which this tendency to 
scientific representation carried him — poems of dissec- 
tion and denunciation, like Despair^ and worse still. The 
Promise of May^ Tennyson was faithful through his 
whole life to beauty, writing always of what was worthy 
of love, of joy, of solemn or happy reverence ; and by 
this, and in this sphere, was the steady artist. The man- 
ifestation of these things, his creation of them, for the 
love and pleasure and veneration of himself and men, 
was his unbroken delight. 



lo Tennyson 

How much we owe to him for this, especially at this 
time, only the future will fully know. It is true, this 
faithfulness to beauty is the foremost characteristic of 
all great artists, the very quintessence of their genius, 
that which makes them permanent ; but he deserves 
perhaps more praise for it than many others, for he was 
tempted by the tendency of his time to swerve from it, 
as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats were not tempted. 
Once or twice he yielded, as I said, but these instances 
only show how much he resisted, and how faithfully. 
This, then, it was which kept him always fresh, even to 
advanced age. He whose eyes are steadily fixed on the 
beautiful, always loves, and is always young. 

Moreover, the true artist has written on his heart, 
" Love not the world, nor the things of the world," and 
this, in spite of many foolish things said of him, was true 
of Tennyson. If what I said of his love of beauty be 
true, he could not have bent his art to the world, and he 
never did. For the artist knows that absolute beauty is 
a perfection which he never can fully grasp, which al- 
ways becomes before him a greater ocean, which there- 
fore invites and kindles an incessant pursuit. He can 
never furl his sail in this pursuit ; he can never turn 
aside, while he is full of its ardour, to any lower or 
meaner love, to any selfish strife. The passion it makes 
glow is one which devours all other passions. The de- 
sire to reveal beauty, to make it clear, so far as he has 
seen it, is a desire which makes all merely personal de- 
sires common and unclean. 



Introduction 1 1 



Whatever vulgar folk have said of Tennyson, his 
whole work breathes with that desire. I do not believe, 
and I cannot trace in one line of his poetry, that he ever 
wrote for the sake of money, or place, or to catch the 
popular ear, or to win a transient praise. He wrote only 
that of which he loved to write, that which moved him 
to joy or reverence, that which he thought of good 
report for its loveliness. Even the things he did as Poet 
Laureate, where, if ever, he might have been untrue to 
this, have no tinge of the world about them. They 
speak to royalties of the things of eternal beauty, of the 
natural sorrows and joys of faithful motherhood and 
wifehood, of duties and sacrifice performed in high 
places — the same duties and sacrifice which might be 
done by the labourer and the slave — of love and honour 
and faith, of those ideals of humanity which are as capa- 
ble of being pursued and fulfilled in the cottage as in the 
palace. The Laureate Odes are more lessons to royal 
folk than celebrations of them. 

He was, then, faithful to loveliness. It is not too 
much to say that he saw all the universe of man and 
Nature and of God in their relation to ineffable beauty, 
and that the getting of this pervading essence outf of all 
things, the shaping of it, and the crying of — " Look 
there ; love and worship, rejoice and reverence," was the 
one supreme thing in his art for which he cared. This 
may be said of all true poets, and it is here said of him. 
It is the mightiest debt we owe to the faithful artists, 
and we feel it all the more deeply at a time when art 



12 Tennyson 



yields more than is seemly to the temptations of the 
world. 

But the power of seeing beauty, and the love of 
beauty, are not all that makes the great artist. He must 
also have the power of shaping the beauty which he sees, 
and in a way peculiarly his own. There must be in the- 
work the personal touch, the individual surprise, the 
unique way, the unimitated shaping which provokes 
imitation. We ought to feel in every artist's work the 
immediate pressure of an original, personal creator, who 
has his own special manner with things and words. This 
is one of the main tests of genius. Of every great poet 
it is true, and it is plainly true of Tennyson. Every 
line is alive with his own distinction. 

On his natural gift of creating, and on his careful 
training of it, I need not dwell, nor yet on his practice 
and love of the skilfulnesses of his art, of the careful 
study of words and their powers in verse, of his mingled 
strength and daintiness and weakness, of all that belongs 
to Form. These things and their like in him have been 
for years the food of critics. No one disputes that he 
touched excellence in them, or that he had the power 
of creation. But I maintain that all his technique was 
not for his own sake, but was first urged by his love of 
beauty. It was necessary, for the sake of his faithful- 
ness to her, that the shape he gave to what he loved 
should be as perfect, as strong, as gracious, and as full 
of delightful surprises as he could make it ; and not one 
of our poets has striven with a more unfailing intensity 



Introduction 13 



to do this honour to all the beauty he saw in Nature and 
in man ; as eager in this at eighty as at thirty years. It 
is a great lesson to all artists ; it is a lesson to us all. 

Power, then, to see beauty, power to shape it, these 
were his. How far he saw it, with what degrees of ex- 
cellence he shaped it, how great an artist he was — is not 
now the question. The question is. Did he always see 
it with love and joy ; did he always shape it with faithful- 
ness ? And I answer that his fidelity to beauty, when- 
ever he saw it, was unbroken. 

II 

Tennyson's Relation to Christianity.—The next 
subject I treat of in this Introduction is Tennyson's rela- 
tion to Christianity. 
y,When Tennyson passed from school to the univer- 
sity, religious life in England had very much decayed. 
The spirit which animated Wesley, and which had 
fallen like the prophet's mantle on the earlier Evan- 
gelicals, had now become cold. English religion, in 
and out of the Church, was like the valley Ezekiel 
described, full of bones, and the bones were dry. And 
in the midst of the valley one figure, now old, who had 
seen the fire of religious sacrifice rise high to God in the 
past, who had welcomed its descent and directed it into 
new channels but who had outlived his enthusiasms, went 
to and fro, chilled at heart, and wailing for what had 
been. It was the soul of Coleridge, and if the voice of 
the Spirit asked him : " Son of Man, can these bones 



14 Tennyson 

live ? " he answered, but not in hope, " O Lord God, 
Thou knowest." He died before he saw the resurrec- 
tion which Tennyson saw, the blowing of the wind of 
God, and the bones coming together, and the slain 
breathed upon, so that they lived and stood upon their 
feet, an exceeding great army. Nevertheless, the old 
prophet did his work, and his power moved in the two 
men, though in a very different fashion, who, in the 
same years which saw a political and poetic resurrection, 
awakened into a new spring, with all the promise of 
summer, the religious life of England. The true begin- 
ning of Tennyson's as of Browning's poetical life was 
coincident with the birth of the movements afterwards 
called the High Church and the Broad Church move- 
ments, and with the birth of a new political and social era. 

Never alone 

Come the immortals. 

This religious awakening was felt and seized by two 
distinct types of character, or of human tendency, and 
crystallised by two representative men, by J. H. New- 
man and Frederick Maurice ; and it is curious for those 
who care for analogies to the evolution of species to 
trace how the one was the child of the University of 
Oxford and the other of the University of Cambridge. 
The main difference which lay between their method of 
presenting the faith was a time-difference, if I may be 
allowed to invent that term. In the matter of religion 
the past was the foremost thing to Newman, to Maurice 



Introduction 15 



the present. Newman looked back to the past (the 
nearer to the Apostles the nearer to truth) for the high- 
est point to which religious life, but not doctrine, had 
attained, and his immense reverence for the past became 
part of the mind of Tennyson. ^But it was balanced in 
Tennyson by even a greater reverence for the present 
as containing in it an immediate inspiration and revela- 
tion from God. This foundation for poetic thought and 
emotion was given to him by the religious work of 
Maurice. The deepest thought in the mind of Maurice 
was that God was moving in the present as fully as He 
had moved in the past ; and the incessant representa- 
tion of this, in every form of it, was his great contribu- 
tion to Theology!] Of course, others before him had 
said similar things, but he said this in a new way, and 
under new conditions. Maurice could not, however, 
quite escape from the web of the past, and his struggle 
to combine the past and the present entangled him, en- 
tangled his mind, and entangled his followers. When 
he clung, as he did, to the ancient intellectual formulas 
as laid down in the Creeds and Services of the Church, 
and tried to weave them into harmony with his main 
faith, he damaged his position, and, up to a certain point, 
his work. 

Tennyson, as a poet, did not fall into this ill-fortuned 
position. What his personal views were concerning the 
creed of Christendom is not the question here. It 
would be an impertinence to discuss them. That is a 
private matter, and we shall hear what his family chose 



Tennyson 



to disclose to us at the fitting time. But his poetry is a 
public possession, and in that poetry there is naturally 
no doctrinal confession, no intellectual propositions 
which define his faith. I say naturally^ because art has 
to do with the illimitable, with that which is for ever in- 
capable of definition, with the things that belong to love 
and beauty, joy and hope and veneration — the shapes, 
degrees, powers, and glory of which are for ever build- 
ing, un-building, and rebuilding themselves in each 
man's soul and in the soul of the whole world. Art not 
only rejects, it abhors all attempts to bind down into un- 
changing forms the thoughts and emotions which play 
like lightning round the infinite horizons towards which 
the imagination sails, piloted by love, and hope, and 
faith. It has no creeds, no articles of faith, no schemes 
of salvation, no confessions ; it cannot have them by its 
very nature. The unknowable, but the believable, is its 
country, its native land, its home. 

Whatever, then, in this matter of religion, the man as 
thinker may confess, the man as poet keeps in the realm 
of the undefined, beyond analysis, beyond reasoning. 
When he does not, when he is tempted into analytic dis- 
cussion, into doctrinal definition, he ceases to be a poet 
for the time and the trouble into which he gets is pitia- 
ble. When Milton argues like a school divine, when 
Wordsworth draws out a plan of education, when Byron 
explains his view of original sin, how sad it is, how the 
Muses cover their faces, how angrily Apollo frowns ! 
Even Dante, who was obliged to do something of this 



Introduction 17 



kind of work, does it only as a means by which he may 
launch him.self forward into the infinite. And Tenny- 
son rarely in this way lost his position as an artist. 
There is no formulated creed in his work. 

But the main faiths of Maurice, which were assertions 
of what he conceived to be " eternal verities " concerning 
the relations of God to man and to the universe, and 
concerning the end to which God was leading them — 
assertions backed up by no proof, for the matters in- 
sisted on could neither be proved nor disproved — were 
naturally in the realm of the imagination, of faith and 
hope, in the infinite realm of love, and were brought to 
receive acceptance or dismissal before the tribunal of 
human emotion, not before the tribunal of the under- 
standing. As such they were proper subjects of poetry; 
and the ever-working immanence of God in man and in 
the universe as Will and Love, as King and Father ; the 
necessary brotherhood of man, and the necessary prac- 
tice of love one to another, if all were in God ; the nec- 
essary evolution (if this vital union between God and 
man existed) of the human race into perfect love and 
righteousness, and the necessary continuance on the 
same hypothesis of each man's personal consciousness 
in a life to be ; the necessary vitality of the present — 
that deep need for high poetic work — man alive and Na- 
ture alive, and alive with the life of God — these faiths 
(I will not call them doctrines, for their definition 
changes incessantly with the progress of human thought 
and feeling) lay at the root of the religion we find in the 



1 8 Tennyson 



poetry of Tennyson and influenced that poetry from 1830 
to 1892. They were part of the elements of the soil 
out of which his poetry grew, and by them, and by the 
way in which he held them, carefully keeping them apart 
from all intellectual definition and in the realm of faith 
alone, he is separated on the one side from all those 
poets who either ignore these things like Keats or pro- 
fess disbelief in them like Shelley, and on the other side 
from all those poets who like Milton, Byron, or Browning 
have a definite theology in their poetry. 

These things, then, may justly be said with regard to 
the religious elements in the poetry of Tennyson, and 
they are all contained in In Memoriam ; nay more, they 
are the very basis of that poem. But the assertion of 
them does not answer the question : What relation does 
Tennyson's poetry bear to Christianity ? For all these 
beliefs might be held by a Theist — even by one who 
ignored or depreciated the teaching of Jesus. If 
Tennyson is then to be claimed as a Christian poet it 
must be shown that he considered Jesus to be the great 
proclaimer of these truths, the one who concentrated 
into Himself the religious truths which before Him had 
been in man, re-formed them in His own thought, and 
issued them with new power and charged with new love, 
to claim the belief of men. This certainly was Tenny- 
son's position.* So far as that goes, Tennyson was 
distinctly Christian, and this is the position of a great 

* In Memoriam, xxxvi. 



Introduction 19 



number of persons at the present day. But if that be all, 
then a great number of persons will deny him the right 
to call himself a Christian. In their mind a Christian 
man must have a distinct faith in Jesus as God, as the 
unique Saviour of man, and as a revealer of God in a 
way different in kind from that in which we can call 
any other person a saviour or revealer. Is that view 
contained in Tennyson's poetry ? We cannot take the 
phrases concerning Christ used in the Idylls of the King, 
or such phrases as " Him who died for me " in The May 
Queen, as any proof of his views, for these might be 
said to be only local colour ; but when we come to In 
Meinoriam we have before us a poem exceedingly per- 
sonal and distinctly theological ; and Christ is called 
there " The Life indeed " ; His power to raise the dead 
is confessed ; He is the receiver of the souls of the dead 
into the world beyond this world ; He is the Word of 
God that breathed human breath and wrought out the 
faith with human deeds. This is not enough to make 
Tennyson, as a poet, an orthodox Christian in the doc- 
trinal sense, but it is enough to place him among 
those who confess Jesus as the Light of the world, as 
their spiritual Master, their Life ; and that with a dis- 
tinctness which does not belong to any other of the great 
poets of this century, so far as their poetry is concerned. 
This position becomes a certainty if the introduction to 
I71 Me7noriam — beginning " Strong Son of God, immortal 
Love " — be an address to Jesus. I think it is, and that 
this is the most natural explanation ; but nevertheless it 



20 Tennyson 



is left vague. On the whole, there is no clear doctrinal 
definition of the person or the work of Christ. What is 
not left vague, what is quite clear, is that Tennyson is 
more Christian than Theist ; that no mere Theist could 
have said the things that he has said in In Memoriam. 

This absence of definite doctrine, which is the reason 
many persons say that Tennyson was not a Christian 
(holding the amusing theory that the Nicene Creed 
rather than the teaching of Jesus is the test of Christian- 
ity) is, first of all, necessitated by his art ; secondly, it 
is in itself Christian. Definite doctrinal statements are, 
as I said, abhorrent to poetry. They belong to the world 
of the understanding, to the world of analysis — a world 
in which the artist cannot breathe at ease, and in which, 
if he continue, his art decays and dies. They take him 
out of the illimitable sky in which the imagination flies 
towards the unknown, the yet unconceived, and the 
ever-varying unchangeable. Had Tennyson defined his 
view of Jesus, he would never have said " Ring in the 
Christ which is to be." In that line the idea of Christ 
and his Gospel in mankind is given an infinite extension. 
We may give the phrase fifty meanings, and we shall 
not exhaust it ; and a hundred years hence it will have 
totally different meanings allotted to it by the gentlemen 
who wish to define. 

Secondly, this absence of propositions invented by 
the intellect, in which ideas like the immanence of God 
in man are limited to one meaning, in which the Father- 
hood of God or the brotherhood of man is rendered 



Introduction 21 



particular instead of being left universal, is in harmony 
with the teaching of Jesus. He proclaimed truths 
which He believed to be universal — God's Fatherhood, 
man's brotherhood, love as the absolute life of God and 
of man, personal immortality in God, the forgiveness of 
sin — but He never put these into any fixed intellectual 
form ; He never attempted to prove them by argument ; 
He never limited them by a prosiac statement of their 
import ; He never took them out of the realm of love 
and faith ; He never gave them a special shape or 
organised them into a body of belief. He left them free, 
left them as spirit and life ; and as to their form, every 
nation, and kindred and tongue, every kind of society, 
nay, every person, could give them whatever intellectual 
shape each of them pleased. If they were loved and 
felt, and the love at the root of them expressed in the 
action of a life, I do not believe that Jesus cared at all 
what form they took in the understanding, or how they 
were organised into ritual and creed — provided only the 
form or the organisation did not contradict the univer- 
sality of the love of God, or the universality of the love 
between man and man which was contained in them. 
Theological creeds were nothing to Jesus, but their 
limitations which produced hatreds and cruelties and 
quarrels, these, to this hour, He looks upon with the pity 
and the indignation of love. The absence then of 
definite opinions about infinite truths, which is the neces- 
sary position of the poet, which was the position of Ten- 
nyson in his poetry, is the position of Christ Himself. 



2 2 Tennyson 



Again, Christianity does not take the same ground as 
ethics, nor was Christ, primarily, a moral teacher. " This 
do and thou shalt live," the moralist says, and it is a 
good thing to say. " When you have done all," says 
Jesus, carrying the whole matter of life into boundless 
aspiration, " say, We are unprofitable servants, we have 
done only what it was our duty to do." " Lord, how 
oft shall I forgive my brother ? Unto seven times ? 
Surely there must be some definition." " Unto seven 
times ? " answered Christ, in astonishment at any limit 
to forgiveness — " nay, any number of times — to seventy 
times seven ! " " All these things," cried the young 
moralist, " all these duties, I have kept from my youth 
up. What lack I yet ? " That was the cry of the ideal 
in him : the inward longing for something more than 
conduct — for the unknown perfection. And Jesus, 
answering this aspiration to the ideal, to those unreached 
summits of love which transcend duty — said, " Sell what 
thou hast, and give to the poor, and come and follow 
me." " Whom shall I love," they asked ; " my rela- 
tions, my friends, my own nation, the members of my 
Church ? Where is the limit ? " There is no limit, was 
the teaching of Jesus ; the infinitude of God's love is 
your true aim. " Love your enemies, do good to them 
that hate you ; so you will be like your Father in heaven, 
whose sun shines on the evil and good alike." "Shall 
I be content with the duties which I can do, with the 
love I can certainly give to my fellow-men, with the 
plain things which lie before me in this world, with the 



Introduction 2^ 

possible in conduct ? " No, thought Jesus, that is not 
my teaching, nor the ground I take. You must aspire 
to the impossible, strive to be equal to the infinite Love, 
love far beyond anything you can understand. It is not 
the possible, but the perfect, for which you must live. 
" Be ye perfect in love, even as your Father is perfect in 
love." Union with the infinite Love by loving ; that is 
the aim of man, an illimitable aim. 

At every point this position of Christ is in the strictest 
analogy to that which the artist takes up with regard to 
beauty. Love, not duty, is the first thing with Jesus ; 
the teaching of loving, not the teaching of morality. If 
love be secured, morality is secured. If a man love 
God, that is, if he love the living source of love, right- 
eousness, justice and truth, he is absolutely certain to 
secure noble conduct. Morality then is not neglected, 
it is taken in the stride of love. And that is the root 
of Jesus. Love fulfils the law ; and all the poets, and 
every artist (whether nominally a Christian or not) take 
a similar position. Love, in its tireless outgoings to- 
wards infinite beauty — the seen suggesting for ever the 
unseen beauty, and that which is conceived of it open- 
ing out a vision of new loveliness as yet unconceived — is 
the artists' root ; and whatever morality they teach is 
the secondary matter, comes as a necessary result of 
love having its perfect work — love which, when we have 
reached the farthest horizon we first saw of it, opens out 
another equally far, and when we have attained that, 
another, and again another, always and for ever. 



24 Tennyson 



This is the Christian position, and it is the position 
Tennyson preserves all through his poetry. There is no 
one, it is true, from whose work better lessons can be 
drawn for the conduct of life, for morals in their higher 
ranges, than can be drawn from Tennyson. But below 
all conduct, as its foundation impulse, lies in this poet's 
work the love of the infinite Love, the passion of unend- 
ing effort for it, and the conviction of an eternity of life 
in which to pursue after it. This eternal continuance in 
us of the conscious life of love ; in other words, of in- 
cessant action towards greater nearness to the illimitable 
Love which is God, is the position of Christ ; and it is 
the position of one who believes in a personal immor- 
tality. One of the foundation faiths of Jesus was that 
every man and woman was as unbrokenly connected 
with the Eternal God as a child is with a father. God 
was our nearest relation ; the relationship was a personal 
one, and could never be untied. In that, our immortal 
continuance, our immortal personality, our immortal 
goodness, were necessarily contained. The declaration 
of immortality was not in itself new, but this ground of 
it — the Fatherhood of God and the childhood to Him of 
every man so that each soul was felt by God, in Him- 
self, as a special person to whom He was in a special 
relation — this, and the universality of its application, 
were new. 

This was Tennyson's position. It might be proved 
up to the hilt from his poetry, and it makes him clearly 
Christian. Owing to the circumstances of his time, it 



Introduction 25 



;vas especially round this question of immortality that 
Tennyson, in his relation to Christianity, concentrated 
himself. Its truth held in it for him the Fatherhood of 
God, the salvation of man, the brotherhood of man, 
the worth of human life. If it were not true, Christianity 
in his eyes was not true, there was no God in the universe 
for man ; there was no true union possible between man 
and man ; there was no religion — nothing to bind men 
together ; there was no explanation of the pain of earth, 
and the whole history of man was a dreadful tragedy. 
That was his view, and he maintained it with all a poet's 
fervor. 

But it would not be true to say that Tennyson had 
not to fight for it against thoughts within which endeav- 
oured to betray it, and against doubts which besieged it 
from without. He did not always repose in it ; he *had 
to fight for it sword in hand, and many a troublous 
wound he took. He was a poet, sensitive to all the 
movements of the world around him, and it fell to his 
lot to live at a time when the faith in immortality has had 
to run the gauntlet between foes or seeming friends, of 
a greater variety and of a greater skill than ever before 
in the history of man. He felt every form of this attack 
in himself ; he battled with himself as he felt them ; he 
battled with them outside himself ; and he won his per- 
sonal victory, having sympathised thus, throughout the 
course of sixty years, with those who have had to fight 
the same battle. Of what worth his contribution is to 
the problem is not the question here. I only state the 



26 Tennyson 



fact, and the manner in which it was done. It was done 
in the manner of a poet — never by argument as such, 
rarely from the intellectual point of view — but by an 
appeal to the emotions, by an appeal to the necessities 
of love. Had he done otherwise, he would have, at that 
point, ceased to be the poet, ceased to rest the truth of 
immortality on faith in that unprovable conviction that 
there was a God and that He was indissolubly bound up 
with the personality of all of His children. 

The trouble began early with him. The religious 
change I have noted in the thirtys disturbed, no doubt, 
his early faith, and the result is written for us in the 
Confessions of a Sensitive Mind. Vacillation of faith is 
the basis of that poem ; and no answer is given to the 
questions proposed therein. Again, the whole question 
— on the basis of " Is life worth living? Is it not better 
not to be ? " — is taken up in The Two Voices. The 
answer is — " Life is not worth living if it does not con- 
tinue, if love is not immortal in God and in us." Then 
The Vision of Sin asks the same question in another form. 
Sensual pleasure in youth has ended in cynicism in age. 
What hope ? There is an answer, the poet says, but it is 
in a tongue no man can understand ; nevertheless it 
comes out of a horizon where God shows like a rose of 
dawn. 

The same question forms the basis of In Memoriam. 
What is the proper answer to the problem of sorrow, of 
the loss of those we love — to the cry of the breaking 
heart all over the world ? Immortal life in God who is 



Introduction 27 



immortal Love, and therefore immortal Life, is the 
answer ; immortal development — immortal union with 
all we love ; the never-ending evolution of all into more 
and more of perfection. 

One God — one law — one element, 

And one far-off divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves. 

A number of questions arising out of the matter are 
proposed, many speculations are made, but the answers 
suggested are all founded, in the necessary manner of 
a poet, on an appeal to love in us, and to the love which, 
if there be a supreme goodness, must be at the very root 
of His being. 

Lastly, it is plain that Tennyson had, when he finished 
In Memoriam^ settled down into quiet on this matter. 
He had fought his doubts and laid them. But the time 
in which he lived did not let him rest. He had again to 
put on his armour and to draw his sword. The argu- 
ment of Darwin that our conscience and our emotions 
came by descent from the brutes was used as an argu- 
ment against immortality. The great development of 
physiological science tended to increase among persons 
of a certain set of mind a naked materialism, more or less 
cynical ; and especially went against all beliefs, like that 
of immortality, which could not be tested by experiment. 
Then, all the outward authority on which the Christian 
faith had long reposed, the grey-haired, authority of the 
Church, the younger authority of the infallibility of the 
Bible, was shaken to its foundations by the application 



28 Tennyson 



of the science of historical criticism to the New Tes- 
tament stories and to the history of the Early Church, 
so that the outward authority for immortality passed 
away from the minds of multitudes, and with it that 
which is bound up with it — the belief in a Divine Father 
of mankind. 

And, now, among those — the greater number, it is 
true — who still clung to these faiths, there was no longer 
peace. Doubts, incessant questions troubled them ; 
faith veiled her face for long periods. Men and women 
fought and still fight for the truths dearest to them, as 
Arthur fought with his foes in that dim, weird battle of 
the West, in a chill and blinding vapour, and looking up 
to heaven only see the mist. 

Then it was that Tennyson — and it is from his poetry 
alone that I gather this — shaken out of his certainty in 
In Memoriam^ feeling all the new trouble of the world, 
took up again the sword against his own questionings 
and against the scepticism of the world in which he 
lived. The mystery of the pains of life, side by side 
with a God of love, deepened around him. No creed, 
no faith, seemed to completely answer it. But all the 
more, he felt that the only chance of an answer was in 
clinging to the conviction of a life to come in which all 
shall be wrought into union with God. Once or twice 
he was carried beyond tolerance into hot indignation 
with those who took away what he believed to be the 
only reply to the problem of pain and evil. 

In his poem of Despair he denounced the " know- 



Introduction 29 

nothings," as he called them, as well as the liars who held 
eternal punishment, and with equal wrath and vigour. 
In The Promise of May he painted, and unfairly, the 
materialist as almost necessarily immoral. He need not 
have been so angry, and he did no good by the passages 
of attack in those poems. Had he believed more at the 
time he wrote them he would not have been so violent. 
He would have felt that, if all men were God's children, 
it mattered little whether these persons denied immor- 
tality or not. They would find out the truth in the end, 
and their disbelief could do no final harm to them or to 
mankind. However, as his life went on, his anger 
seemed to pass away. He resumed his old method of 
warfare — the method of the artist — the appeal to love, 
the appeal to the heart of man, the appeal to the incred- 
ibility of all the glory and all the growth of man, of all 
the dreadfulness of his fate, being alike closed in univer- 
sal death. Many are the poems in his later volumes, 
poems like Vast?iess, for example, which take up this 
artist-position. At last, as it seems, all his distress ceased 
in quiet, in a faith even more settled than that of In 
Memoriam, Some trouble still lives in the last volume, 
published while he was yet alive. Vastness still strikes 
a wavering note. He says in another poem that, *' In 
spite of every creed and faith, Life is the Mystery." In 
the poem. By aii Evolutionist^ the end seems a matter of 
hope rather than of certainty. The last poem in the 
book. Crossing the Bar^ is the first clear cry of happy 
faith — all doubt and trouble past ; and it is a quiet 



Tennyson 



faith that persists through the new volume which con- 
tains his last words to the people of England. The 
Making of Maft, while it accepts evolution, carries it 
onward to the perfect accomplishment of all humanity 
in God : 

Hallelujah to the Maker. It is finished. Man is made. 

The Dreamer has no uncertainty. Doubt and Prayer 
and Faith^ the one following the other, assert that " Love 
is his Father, Brother, and his God," and that Death 
flings open the gates of all that we desire in the heart. 
God aftd the Ufiiverse, written on the threshold of death, 
reveals that all the fear of dissolution has gone for ever. 
" The face of Death is toward the Sun of Life — his 
truer name is ' Onward,' " so the poet speaks again to 
the mourners in the last poem of his last book. 

This faithful fighter then, who stood, like Horatius, 
for sixty years defending the strait bridge of faith in 
immortal life, defending it against his own doubts and 
those of his time, laid down his arms at last, conscious 
of his victory. Time will tell whether it is a victory also 
for us. For my part, I have no shadow of doubt as to 
the conclusion the world will finally come to on this 
matter ; and when that conclusion is reached, the long 
battle of Tennyson for the Christian faith, for God as 
the Father of all, and for the necessary inference of 
immortality from that primary declaration of Christ 
Jesus, will be acknowledged by the steady gratitude of 
mankind. 



Introduction 31 



III 
Tennyson's Relation to Social Politics.— I now 

turn, in this Introduction, to Tennyson's relation to the 
movement of Humanity. 

In literature as in Nature there is continuity of de- 
velopment, and the germs of the subjects which the 
new poetry of any generation develops into fuU-foli- 
aged trees are to be found in the poetry which pre- 
ceded that new poetry. The poetry of Nature, as 
fully written by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, had, 
as it were, a child-life before their time. The theo- 
logical poetry of Browning, of Tennyson, of a host 
of minor poets, arose out of certain tendencies of 
thought and emotion which were expressed, in opposi- 
tion to the orthodox theology of their time, by Byron 
and Shelley. The various forms of the poetry of 
human life, and especially of the poetry of human 
progress, which the poets embodied from the year 1830 
to the year 1870, were outlined, as it were, in the poetry 
of the first thirty years of this century. In what man- 
ner Tennyson developed the poetry of Nature is a fasci- 
nating subject ; but it will best be treated in connection 
with his poems. What he did with regard to the theo- 
logical shapes which emerged in his time has already 
received notice. What did he say of the subjects which 
belong to the growth of humanity towards a better 
society ? What relation did he bear to social politics, if 
I may use that term ? 

With the impulse given by Reform in 1832, a number 



32 Tennyson 

of questions belonging to social progress were reawak- 
ened into a fuller life, and took new forms. Was the 
power of government best placed in the hands of the 
whole people, or in the hands of great men ? It is plain 
that Tennyson answered with Carlyle that great men 
(provided they had, like Wellington, a supreme sense of 
duty, a proviso Carlyle did not always insert) were those 
in whose hands power should dwell. Freedom, in his 
conception of it, was safer with them. The voice of 
the people, he thought, was a babbling voice, for the 
people were led by mere orators. Tennyson was never 
\ democratic at heart. He never understood what democ- 
racy in its reality meant, much less did he ever conceive 
its ideal. He was always an aristocrat, though he would 
have said, with justice, that it was a government of the 
best men that he desired, and not a government of rank 
and birth alone. Rank and birth, when they were un- 
worthy of their privileged position, he despised and de- 
nounced, because they were inhuman. But I do not 
think that he ever wished that rank should be dissolved, 
or privileges overthrown, or that he even conceived the 
idea that the people of themselves were to choose the 
best men. ^ He saw (from his poetic point of view) that 
all men were equal in their relations to the common 
feelings and duties of the race ; that in suffering, in 
love, in the desire of right and justice, in the visions 
and longings of youth and age, there was an eternal 
equality ; and, like all the great poets, his work in this 
realm of thought has drawn men and women of all 



Introduction 33 

ranks and classes into a closer sympathy with one an- 
other, and placed them hand in hand on a common 
ground of humanity ; but when it came to extending 
that community of human relationship into the political 
or the social sphere, he not only drew back, he did not 
understand what this meant. The Republicanism with 
which Wordsworth and Coleridge were at first enchanted, 
and from which they afterwards retreated ; the revolu- 
tionary spirit of Byron and his crusade against respecta- 
bility ; the more deliberate wrath of Shelley with the 
whole of the idols and oppression of a society founded 
as he believed on caste and force and not on equality 
and love, were one and, all wholly unrepresented by 
Tennyson, nay, they wereMmplicitly attacked by him. 
HisT whole conception of law and government, and of 
freedoni^v^xcluded them from its circle. Not in his 
hands, then, lay the development of the seeds which 
Shelley had scattered in his manhood. No, nor even 
those which Wordsworth had sown in his youth. He 
was much more, on this side, the true successor of 
Keats, to whom all these political and social questions 
were, because of their apparent ugliness, repulsive ; and 
who took refuge from them in the stories of the Greeks 
and of the Renaissance out of which time had with- 
drawn the coarse and left the beautiful. But Keats 
lived at a time when there was no national emotion, 
when men were really weary of the democratic ideas, 
and he represents that weariness. \Dennyson, on the 
contrary, did live in a time of national emotion, and 



34 Tennyson 



though he partly followed Keats in a retreat to the past, 
yet he could not altogether, even had he desired it, 
loosen himself from the excitement which encompassed 
him. His age was vividly with him, and he wrote of 
patriotism, of the proper conception of freedom, of the 
sad condition of the poor, of the woman's position in 
the onward movement of the world, of the place of 
commerce and science in that movement, of war as the 
remedy for the selfishness and evils of commerce, and 
of the future of the race. These are the main things 
he touched, and of them all it is true that they were 
questions which had been outlined in the previous 
poetic period, and outlined in the new forms they took 
after 1832. 

The first of these is Patriotism. 

I have said that he felt strongly the vitality of the 
present in which he lived. But he also brought into the 
present an immense reverence for the past, and that is 
one of the strongest foundations of his patriotism. The 
poem, which begins 

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought 
From out the storied Past, 

is but one of the hundred utterances, the note of which 
remained the same clear sound from the beginning to 
the end. It was a pity that the emotion was chiefly given 
to the warlike glories of England by land and sea, and 
but little bestowed on the long and more glorious though 
faraeless struggle of people and towns for civic liberty ; 



Introduction 35 



but we may well excuse the poet's preference for valour 
and for death m behalf of the honour of the land in the 
striking circumstance of war. This is more vivid for 
verse, and The Revenge : A Ballad of the Fleets and The 
Defence of Lucknow, and The Charge of the Light 
Brigade^ will always stir English hearts. 

Moreover, no one has better dwelt on the noble ele- 
ments of English character, their long descent to us 
from the past, and the sacred reverence that we owe to 
them, than Tennyson. He has strengthened, by the ex- 
pression of this reverence, love of country among this 
people, and the strength he has thus added to it will 
endure as a power in England. It will be more than a 
power. It will be a voice to recall us to reverence when, 
in the push onwards to a future liberty and in the heated 
atmosphere of that strife, we tend to forget how much 
we owe to the ancient forms and to the by-gone men, the 
results of whose work we may put aside as unfitted for 
the present time. For if in our excitement for the fu- 
ture we lose reverence for the past, the loss of reverence 
will so injure the soul of the nation that when we gain 
our objects in the time to come, we shall not be able to 
keep them nobly or to use them rightly. No splendid 
future, splendid in that just feeling for righteousness and 
love which hinders the despotism that so often succeeds 
a wholly irreverent revolution, can be won by a nation 
which has forgotten veneration for its magnanimous 
past. The work of Tennyson, in this point of patriot- 
ism, is altogether fine and true. 



36 Tennyson 

Nevertheless, it had its extreme. It ran sometimes 
into an English Chauvinism^ and in this extreme Tenny- 
son became, with a curious reversion to the type of the 
Englishmen of Nelson's time, the natural opponent, even 
the mocker of France and the French character. The 
words which, at the end of The Princess^ he puts into the 
mouth of the Tory member's son, represent a part of his 
own point of view, though they are modified in the reply 
that follows. Phrases like 

The red fool-fury of the Seine, 

show how he looked on the passionate forms which po- 
litical ideas had received in France, and the one-sided 
view he took of our neighbours' character. He saw only 
the evil of these things, just because he was so exclu- 
sively of the solid English type. Now and again the 
natural variety of a poet made him attempt to see the 
other side, as in the answer to the Tory member's son. 
But it was against the grain. He saw but little of what 
France has done for us ; he had no gratitude to her for 
her audacity, her swiftness, her logical expansion into 
form of the thoughts of progress ; he did not see or feel 
that much of the freedom we have lately won was owing 
to England's calm contemplation, with a certain amount 
of pleasurable but base contempt, of the mistakes which 
France alone had the boldness and the self-sacrifice to 
make for the world. He did not see our cool acceptance 
of the results for liberty which emerged after the mis- 
takes of France had run their course. She bore the 



Introduction 37 



consequences of her mistakes, but in exhausting these 
she set the true form of certain ideas of liberty clear. 
We take the ideas she has set free, but we forget that 
she revealed them. There has been no ingratitude so 
great in the history of humanity as the ingratitude of 
Europe to France, and Tennyson represented with great 
vividness this ingratitude in England. 

Hence, or rather along with this, he did not, except 
now and then in vague suggestions, carry the love of 
country forward into the love of mankind. He had but 
little sympathy in his poetry with other nations. At 
this point he is far behind Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
Byron, and Shelley. The only struggles for freedom 
with which he openly sympathises were those of Poland 
in his youth, and of Montenegro in his age. The battle 
of Italy for liberty is scarcely mentioned. The struggle 
of the North against slavery in the United States is 
never touched. Nor could he write, and this illustrates 
still further his insulation, as Browning wrote, of Italy, 
of Spain, of France, of modern Greece, of men and 
women's lives away from England. He never became 
international. The higher conception to which love of 
our own nation is to lead — the love of all nations as 
contained in one nation, the nation of Man — did not 
shine in the mind of Tennyson. It arose into clear 
form with the French Revolution ; it has taken a new 
and a better form in modern times, but none of its de- 
velopments were sympathised with, were even conceived 
by Tennyson. He was at this point over-English. He 



38 Tennyson 



is, at this point, out of sympathy with the progress of 
Man. He is not, at this point, our poet, or the poet of 
the future. 

Again, take the idea of human freedom ; which, 
thrown as it was by Shelley into the arena where the 
young emotions of the present contend with grey-haired 
theories of the past, became a much more actual consid- 
eration in all national life after 1832. That idea is not 
only freedom to speak the thing we will, or freedom of 
act or contract, or such national liberty only as all Eng- 
lishmen enjoy — but the setting free of all members of 
the State by the State from all that hinders the full 
development of every citizen. This is what it has now 
become within the last thirty years. But It was nothing 
like that in 1832. It was a bourgeois, not a popular, re- 
form which was then initiated ; and the poor were as 
much neglected by it, as the middle class had been be- 
fore it. But the disturbance it caused extended down- 
wards to the labouring classes, then quite uneducated ; 
and the riots and excesses that arose made short-sighted 
persons doubt the expediency of even the measure of 
Reform given in 1832. These riots and violences were 
caused by the misery and by the neglect of the poor, 
and they seemed mere mob-furies to men of a quiet 
type, like Tennyson. Such men felt themselves forced 
to consider over again the idea of freedom ; and the 
reaction from what seemed revolutionary action on the 
one side, and on the other side from Utopias like Shel- 
ley's, was extreme. 



Introduction 



39 



One would have thought that a poet, touched by the 
reality of misery arid its exceeding bitter cry, would 
have held the balance equally poised at least, and not 
yielded too far to the reaction ; that he would have had 
indignation at the state of society, and been inwardly 
urged to give, in the manner of a prophet, some predic- 
tion of a hope near at hand for the woes and weakness 
of the oppressed. But though there are many passages 
where Tennyson does try to hold an equal balance, and 
to excuse or even to advocate the impassioned rising of 
the oppressed in speech or act against their fate, these 
passages are short, are tentative ; he is, as it were, forced 
into them ; and the main line he takes is the line of 
careful protection of the old against the onset of the 
new, of steady but very prudent advance through obe- 
dience to existing law, of protest against that which he 
calls " raw haste," of discouraging of indignant speech 
and act on the part of the people, of distrust, even of 
contempt, for what seemed to him the mob and for their 
" lawless din " ; and, in consequence of all this, he puts 
off the regeneration of society to a period so far away 
that it may be counted by thousands and thousands of 
years. It is with almost a scientific analysis of the whole 
question of the future society, and with arguments 
drawn from geology (as if humanity were in close anal- 
ogy to Nature), that he predicts the enormous time in 
which the betterment or the perfection of society will 
be wrought. He had really little or no faith in man as 
man, but he had faith in man as conducted, in reasona- 



40 Tennyson 

ble obedience, to the final restitution by an entity which 
he called law, and which was, in reality, his own con- 
ception of the Constitution of England built up into 
power, not by the people, but by a few great men and 
by the bulk of the educated and landed classes who 
alone were fit to direct the blind forces of the people. 
I do not say that he did not slide out of this position 
here and there in his poetry. He could scarcely help it 
as a poet, but nevertheless this was his main position, 
and on the whole he kept to it all his life. It was not 
altogether his standing-place when he was young. A 
different spirit inflames the lines which begin : 

And Freedom rear'd in that august sunrise 

Her beautiful bold brow, 
When rites and forms before his burning eyes 

Melted like snow. 

That, and the rest of them, smack of the passionate 

poet. But this vague fire did not last. A batch of 

poems : You ask me why tho' ill at ease — Of old sat 

Freedom on the heights — Love thou thy land — mark his new 

position — that of a man who, like the constitution of a 

land 

Where freedom slowly broadens down 
From precedent to precedent, 

" regards gradation, lest the soul of Discord race the 
rising wind," and sits (distrusting all that is not accu- 
rately balanced, all that shares in political emotion 
whether of wrath or eager love) apart from those 
stormier miseries of man which seem to double when- 



Introduction 41 



ever men eagerly desire for their lives a greater freedom 
of development. I do not presume to blame him for 
this. On the contrary, this position towards the prog- 
ress of man in freedom, this " nor swift, nor slow to 
change, but firm " ; this quiet maturing, in self-control, 
of hberty ; make this close respect for law a standing- 
place necessary to be preserved. It is, in fact, that of 
the sturdy good sense of England, led to this conclusion 
by careful reasoning on the past, and by an intellectual 
analysis of the course of its history. I should be very 
sorry to lose the ballast of the boat. 

But when it is the only position taken up by the army 
of freedom, it ends in the overwhelming of freedom for 
a time. It becomes blind and deaf to the woes of man. 
And it is always a position in which it is surprising to 
find a poet. One would think that he would naturally 
be in the other great division of the army of freedom — 
on the side of the inarticulate emotions of the people — 
supporting that struggle for freedom of growth which is 
inspired by indignation against oppression, or by im- 
pulsive pity which rushes into act ; which is driven on 
by faiths which do not argue ; by hopes which have 
little ground in experience ; by aspirations towards all 
that at present seems impossible ; by the fire of the 
greater passions whose speech and deeds seem madness 
to the steady world. This is the side which the poet, 
when he thinks of freedom for man, naturally takes. 
Wordsworth took it, Coleridge took it, Byron took it, 
Shelley took it, Browning took it, but — Tennyson did 



42 Tennyson 



not ! His was the view of the common-sense, well- 
ordered Englishman — of Whiggism in her carriage with 
a very gracious smile and salute for Conservatism in hers 
—and he tried, unhappily as I think, to get this view 
into poetry. 

Through the whole of Tennyson's poetry about the 
problem of man's progress, this view of his does damage 
to the poetry ; lowers the note of beauty, of aspiration, 
of fire, of passion ; and lessens the use of his poetry 
to the cause of freedom. If the poet take the unpoetic 
side of any question he gives no help to mankind, so far 
as the question concerns mankind. The same things 
said in prose are very good sense, and in harmony with 
their vehicle. But, said in poetry, they sound wrong ; 
they seem unnatural ; and they harm the cause they 
intend to support. It had been far more right and 
natural, had Tennyson taken up the other side — a side 
just as necessary, even more necessary, for the advance 
of human freedom than the side of cautious and lawful 
development of liberty — the side of the rushers, of the 
enthusiastic seekers, of the wild warriors, of the sacrifi- 
cers whom the world calls insane, of the indignant men 
whose speech and action Tennyson thought were " blind 
hysterics of the Celt." That way poetry lies : and that 
way lies the permanent influence of a poet on humanity, 
so far as this question is concerned. 

This unfortunate position — not in itself, for I have 
maintained it as quite a true position for one half of 
the army of freedom to support, but unfortunate for a 



Introduction 43 



poet — threv his poetry on matters related to the full and 
free development of mankind out of gear. He some- 
times got curiously in the wrong, as on the subject of war. 
He became unpoetically hopeless with regard to the 
future, wavering to and fro without any fixed or luminous 
faith in progress ; having a distant and half laisscz faire 
sympathy with the sorrows of the people, and seeing — 
and this is the strangest of all — a remedy for their sor- 
rows in the greater growth of commerce as it exists at 
present, and in the further development of practical 
science hand in hand with commerce. When we read 
these things in poetry we say : " Why, this is wondrous 
strange ! " 

When he does express indignation for the miseries of 
the poor and against the cause of them — the unbridled 
competition of commerce — he puts that indignation into 
the mouth of the half-hysterical and morbid lover of 
Maud, or into the mouth of the lover in Locksley Hall^ 
when he has grown old. Moreover, he does not speak 
from himself, but in the voice of the characters he draws, 
men wanting in " self-reverence, self-knowledge, self- 
control." A false light is thus thrown on the sorrows 
of the poor. It is as if half of them existed only in the 
morbid fancies of men. At least, there is no vital sym- 
pathy expressed for them ; and, indeed, Tennyson lived 
apart from this suffering world and knew nothing about 
it. He vaguely sees that ruthless competition is at the 
bottom of these evils, but he looks for the extension of 
that system of commence which is based on and makes 



44 Tennyson 



competition as one of the main elements in the fully 
developed happiness of mankind. He vaguely sees 
that mechanical science has been made the slave of 
competition, and has increased, through this unhappy 
union, the troubles at the bottom of society, but he 
,looks for the fuller development of the present system 
by science as one of the means of redeeming these 
evils. He sees plainly that the world is wrong, but he 
seems to think that it is to be cured by the slow and 
steady improvement of the present social and com- 
mercial system, tempered, when it gets too bad, by wars. 
He sees, or Maud's lover sees, that this system leads 
to organised selfishness ; that men become, under it, 
materialised ; that the higher qualities of the heart and 
soul are crushed by it — and this is the subject of the be- 
ginning of Maudj and of a few other poems. What is his 
remedy ? Not the abandonment of the system, and not 
a crusade against the causes of these evils, not even any 
legislative attempt to lessen them, but a war, in which 
" commerce should not be all in all, and noble thought 
be freer under the sun," in which men should " feel with 
their native land, and be one with their kind," in which 
the desire of self-sacrifice should again awake in the 
country. Of all means of cure suggested for the evils 
of competition, war is the most fooHsh, and it doubles 
the misfortunes of the poor. Those who are sacrificed 
the most in battle, and tortured to death by thousands, 
and who get none of the personal glory, are the poor. 
The taxes are doubled, and the doubling falls heaviest 



Introduction 45 

on the poor. The competition and the cheating of those 
capitalists who happen to desire to increase their store 
at any cost are increased in war-time. The selfish are 
made more selfish ; the troubles of the poor workmen 
are trebled ; the army suffers and starves, and dies of 
cold and misery — as we found out, only too well, in the 
Crimean war. A costly medicine it was ! 

This is not the way to remedy the ills of the people, 
nor is it the best way to develop self-sacrifice, noble 
thought, civic honour or justice in a people. There is 
another way in which the call for civic self-sacrifice en- 
ters into the daily and hourly life of every citizen ; but 
that way, which forms now the basis of all action and 
prophecy towards a nobler society, did not enter into 
the poetry of Tennyson at all, and its absence left him 
no expedient for curing a selfish society but the clumsy 
expedient of war. 

I make no complaint against Tennyson for all this. I 
only state the case. If he was of this temper, it was 
because it was mainly the temper of the time in which 
he grew to his maturity, the thirty years from his first 
volume to the end of the sixties. He represented the 
political and social opinions of that time very fairly, but 
not as a poet who had much prophetic fire and pity in 
him would be expected to write. Nor did he make any 
impetuous casts into the future when he wrote of these 
things, save once in Locksley Hall. In these matters, he 
was not before his age, nor when the age changed did 
he change with it. He remained for another thirty 



46 Tennyson 



years in precisely the same position, while the world 
changed round him. His poetry on other matters con- 
tinued to exalt and console the world, to illuminate it 
with beauty and grace and tender thought. He has been 
a blessing to us all in a thousand ways in these last 
thirty years. But on the matters of which I treat of 
here, he was either silent or in opposition to the ideas of 
a higher liberty. Collectivism, for example, which be- 
gan to grow up about 1866 (which, while it was in op- 
position to the individualism which so rapidly developed 
after 1832, yet holds in it a much greater opportunity 
for complete individuality than we have even conceived 
as yet) does not seem to have even dawned on the mind 
of Tennyson. He is behind the whole of this move- 
ment — the master movement of our time. In matters 
then of this kind he is not the poet of the people. He 
is our poet in the things which he treated poetically ; 
and in those which have to do with Nature and God and 
the sweet, honest and tender life of men and women, 
he will remain our poet as long as the language lasts, but 
in these social matters not. One only subject of this 
kind he treated well and as a poet, and that was the 
question of woman and her relation to modern life ; a 
question which was started by Shelley, and which occu- 
pied a great place in poetry after 1832. As far as he 
saw into that matter, he saw it with freedom and clear- 
ness and love, and The Princess is a real contribution to 
that subject. But that stands alone. In all other mat- 
ters belonging to the progress of society, he does not 



Introduction 47 



belong to the last thirty years, to our time, our hopes, or 
our faith ; nor does he think and feel in them as a poet. 
Look, in conclusion, at the faith he had concerning 
the future of mankind, at the hopes he entertained for 
it. Was he swept away, as the poets are, into high pre- 
diction ? Did he realise by faith that a better time 
might be near at hand ? No, embayed in these con- 
servative doctrines, unable to loosen himself from their 
ice, he had enough of the logic of a poet to see that, 
supposing they were all true, the progress of society 
towards a better and a perfect life must be of almost an 
infinite slowness ; so very slow, so very far away, that 
man in the present is left all but hopeless. There is 
nothing in Tennyson in this matter of the rush or the 
faith of the prophet. The impulse he gives is faint, and 
his hope is only too like despair. The young man of 
Locksley Hall repents when he is old of almost all the 
enthusiasms of his youth : 

Forward far and far from here is all the hope of eighty years. 

In the very last book, the " Ghost of the brute " in 
men may be laid, but only in a hundred thousand years, 
or in a million summers away. Before the crowning 
age arrive in the making of man, aeon after aeon shall 
pass. " We are far from the noon of man, there is time 
for the race to grow." 

Time ! when half the world and more are in torture ! 
It ought not to be in a poet to take things so easily. It 



48 Tennyson 



is true that Tennyson4ooks beyond this world, and sees 
the sorrowful made blessed there, and, indeed, I hold 
that to be the truest of consolations. But if it is to make 
us take evils easily here — we especially who are com- 
fortable — I hold that it is not unwise to put it out of our 
minds for a time ; and it may be that the general disbe- 
lief in immortality has its deepest ground in that feeling, 
and perhaps its reason. For my part, I do not think we 
have any right to think of a heaven for others, much less 
of a heaven for ourselves in the world to come, until we 
are wholly determined to make this world a heaven for 
our fellow-men, and are hoping, believing, loving, and 
working for that, and for its realisation not in a thousand 
or a million years, but in a nearer and a nearer future. 
That is what a poet should feel and write for nowadays. 
That should be the passion in his heart and the fire in 
his verse. 




CHAPTER I 
THE POEMS OF 183O 

IT is fortunate for the historian of poetry in this century 
that the close of each school of poetry is so clearly 
divided from the rise of its successor. Shelley, 
Byron, and Keats died within a few years of each 
other, between 182 1 and 1824. Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
Southey, Landor, and Walter Scott (though they lived 
beyond 1824) belonged to a school which preceded 
that of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. They overlapped the 
lives of these three poets, but all the three had arisen 
when Wordsworth and the rest had done their best work. 
They represent other spheres of thought, and embody 
other worlds of emotion. Byron, enamoured of his own 
powerful personality, and rejoicing in his isolation from 
the crowd while he was angry with its attack upon him, 
proud and vain at the same time, laughed to scorn the 
peaceful, proper, prim, and comfortable life into which 
the English middle class had subsided after the peace of 
1815, and held up himself as its poetic contrast — the 
lonely, soul-shattered wanderer whom a quiet home-life 
4 49 



50 Tennyson 



revolted, who preferred, for choice, to live like the Giaour 
or the Corsair — and who finally attacked all the respect- 
able hypocrisy of England in the revolutionary mockery 
of Do}i yuan. He did this needful work with exaggera- 
tion, but had it not been done with exaggeration, it would 
not perhaps have rescued England's poetry from the ideal 
of George III. No temper can be a greater contrast than 
Byron's on the one side to that of his predecessor, Words- 
worth, and on the other to that of his successor, Tennyson. 
Byron did not like — and I put it mildly — the philosophic 
gentlemen of The Excursio?i ; he would have disliked 
still more the Arthur of the Idylls of the King. Indeed, 
it was high time, when poetry in the hands of Tennyson 
had dwelt so much on the conservative, law-abiding, 
and regular elements of life as to make us fear that 
the more audacious and freer elements beyond conven- 
tional society would be lost to poetry, that Swinburne 
should again, like Byron, bring in the revolutionary spirit, 
and attack that temper in poetry which, in weaker hands 
than Tennyson's, might again degenerate into Pharisa- 
ism and put the imagination into a coop like a goose 
at Strasbourg. The way Swinburne did it in his youth 
was open to objections — poets, by their very nature, 
SAveep into wild exaggeration of their revolts — but it was 
well that it was done. Byron did the same thing in his 
time. He was at this point the child of the literature 
which preceded the Revolution. His movement of mind 
and emotion is part of the storm which began to blow 
in the eighteenth century. 



1 



The Poems of 1830 51 

Shelley was also its child, but he represented his parent 
in a very different manner from Byron. He was not 
personal ; he did not attack the existing society with 
mockery. He did not praise the isolated or the corsair 
life, nor the immoral life. He lived as he pleased, it is 
true, and he left English society severely alone. But he 
was concerned chiefly with ideas, and what he attacked 
were the evil things which hindered the progress of man- 
kind. He hated despotisms ; he hated those religious 
views which enslaved the soul, and those persons who 
used these views for the sake of power. As such, he 
went back, when the political aim of the Revolution was 
dead in England, to the original ideas of the Revolution. 
He took up their all but extinguished torch, and waved 
it round and round his head, till in his hands it took 
fire again. It was only for a time. He had not power 
enough to keep it kindled, and finally he left behind him 
all hope of realising in his own time the ideas of equality. 
What he did do, was to conceive in his own mind the 
regeneration of society and the overthrow of its evils ; 
and to sing of what humanity would be in the future ; 
and it is his undying hope in this regeneration of man, 
his faith and love of it, and the power with which he 
has infused it into men, for which we owe him an endless 
gratitude. 

This was the last effort of this school of poetry ap- 
plied to the conditions of the world of its own time, the 
last recognition these poets gave to their present. It 
was also the last breath for the time of the impulse 



52 Tennyson 



given to song by the early ideas of the Revolution. The 
poetry of this century, up to this point, had been fre- 
quently concerned with the social and political move- 
ment, with the European struggle, with ethical or theo- 
logical forms of thought, with the life and feelings of 
the poor, with the glory of the past, with humanity at 
large, with philosophies and theories of the race and 
its destiny. But now poetry ceased to speak of these 
matters. And no wonder! The poets received no im- 
pulse from without. There was no care for an ideal life 
left in England, no interest in the future condition of man, 
no enthusiasm of humanity. England was sick of social, 
political, and theological matters, of theories of life. 
" Let me alone," it said, *' torment me not ; " and it 
fell into a materialism which stopped its ears to every 
voice likely to disturb its dull repose. Wordsworth 
felt this even in 1806, ten years before its fulness, when 
he wrote that sonnet on the besotted state of the country — 

The world is too much with us : late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
We have given our hearts away — a sordid boon ! 

a sonnet which ends, having declared that mankind was 
out of tune with natural beauty, in one of his rare out- 
bursts of passion — a cry for deliverance from a stagnant 
worlds- 
Great God ! I 'd rather be 

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 



The Poems of 1830 53 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

Keats felt the same loss of joy and life in the world 
with a shock of misery, and expressed it. " Glory and 
loveliness," he cried, " have passed away." What did 
he do ? The present said nothing to his imagination. 
No wind from it blew upon his soul and awakened the 
flowers in its garden. He had no care for the theolo- 
gies, for social theories, for humanity at large, for its 
future destiny. Living alongside of Byron and Shelley, 
he had nothing to do with their interests. He was, 
practically, living after them, in a world which did not 
share in a single one of their emotions. But emotions 
are necessary to a poet, and if he cannot get them in the 
present, and if the future be nothing to him, as it is 
nothing to the man who is not excited by the present, 
he must seek for his emotions in the past. There, in 
that bygone world, is the beauty, or the romance, 
which he cannot find beside him ; or there, at least, he 
sees and feels it. It was in the past that Keats chose to 
live, quite away from England. The Pagan world to 
which Wordsworth wished to return in his temporary 
passion, Keats always desired to have with him. He 
sang of Endymion in the woods and caves of Latmos. 
He sang of young life at Athens ; he sang of a more 
ancient world and of the primeval gods. He sang of 
Lorenzo and Isabella in mediaeval Florence ; he sang 
of Porphyro and Madeline in a world which has 



54 



Tennyson 



no history. And the only thing he saw in the present 
which was worth a song was the doings of Nature, 
whose youth is everlastingly lovely, and who has nothing 
to do with man. 

His poetry, therefore, represents the complete ex- 
haustion of the fire of the Revolution, the complete 
abandonment of the present as able to give any impulse 
to the poet ; and if no new impulse had come to stir 
England to her depths, to place all the old problems 
in a new light, which light also brought with it a kind- 
ling fire, to awaken new interest in the life of the pres- 
ent and in the strife of humanity to its goal, poetry 
would have altogether ceased after Keats. The past 
alone does not supply enough fuel to keep up the fires 
of the imagination. 

And, indeed, we see that plainly enough in the his- 
tory of the time. No poet of any vivid eagerness, 
much less of any originality, appeared now for some 
years. The poetry which was produced, with the single 
exceptions of Landor, and of Wordsworth (whose work, 
though it had lost youth, was still weighty with power 
and grave sentiment), was either an imitation of past 
models, or pale, pretty, washed-out work like that of 
Mrs. Hemans, with an easy melody and a slipshod senti- 
ment. Every one knew the methods, the images, the 
very rhymes that were used. All was convention, 
naught was art. 

The Foefus of Two Brothers^ written by Alfred 
Tennyson and his brother, and published in 1827 — a 



The Poems of 1830 55 

collection of their very youthful efforts — illustrate this 
point. They are without one trace of originality, force, 
or freshness — faded imitations of previous poets, chiefly 
of Byron ; or, where not imitative, full of the futile mod- 
esty of boyhood, which would fain be vain but does not 
dare ; made up partly of bold noise and partly of senti- 
mentality, accurately true to the type of the English 
poetry between the death of Shelley and the publication 
of Tennyson's volume of 1830. It is one of the literary 
puzzles of the world that certain great poets, as, for 
example, Shelley and here Tennyson, write trash in 
their boyhood ; and within a year or two step on to a 
level of original power. What happens in the meantime 
to make the change ? It is not as if these boyish poems 
were only poor work. Shelley's verses before Queen Mab 
were detestable. Tennyson's verses in the Poems of 
Two Brothers^ were only not quite so bad. But they 
were in complete harmony with the poetry of the time. 

Along with this dishevelled work there was a wonder- 
ful flourishing of criticism. Reviews and weekly papers 
explained what poetry was, and slashed and praised the 
poets past, present, and even to come. The more poetry 
decayed, the more eagerly the critics dissected her body, 
till, when any living poetry really appeared, they (having 
been accustomed to the lifeless poetry) cried out at the 
living thing as something too horrible to be endured. 
This is the fate and the punishment of criticism of the 
Arts done for the sake of criticism. The more, then, 
the critics think they see, the blinder they become. 



56 Tennyson 



Along with this there was necessarily a highly cultured 
literary class, who were indeed chiefly made up of the 
critics, and who wrote incessantly about literature, but 
rarely created any — just such a class as exists to-day revel- 
ling in their academic excellence ; who do two things, 
both equally foolish, overblame what is new, or over- 
praise it ; having special enmities or special affec- 
tions, and equally damaging those they abuse and those 
they praise. The one thing of which, as a body, they 
are almost incapable, is the recognition of that which is 
really good, which has in it life, continuance, and power. 
As only one or two men (and those poets themselves) 
saw what was in Wordsworth, Shelley, or Keats when they 
published their second volumes, so only one or two 
saw what was in the earlier volumes of Tennyson and 
Browning. 

Tennyson's poems of 1830 were, with the exception of 
about a dozen, very much like the other poetry of 
the time. But those new things set Tennyson apart. 
He who wrote them was quite certain to write better 
and better poetry. They were original in their metre 
(which was poor), in word-painting, in the use of words, 
in thought, and in the way in which emotion was reached 
and seized and shaped. The same originality, but to a 
greater degree, belongs to Browning's first poem. My 
business, however, is Tennyson, and 1 will now place, 
in connection with what I have said, his earliest emer- 
gence as an original poet. That emergence is first 
seen in the Cambridge Prize Poem — 1829 — of Tvnbuctoo, 



The Poems of 1830 57 

and in The Lover's Tale, written the year before, when 
he was nineteen years old. Tennyson withdrew The 
Lover s Tale from publication after he had printed 
it in 1833, but on its being pirated in 1879, published it 
with its continuation, The Golden Supper, in 1879. The 
poem tells of a boy and a girl who are brought up to- 
gether. The boy falls into passionate love with the 
girl ; the girl cares for him only as a sister and tells him 
in her innocent confidence that she loves his friend 
Lionel. The misery of this to the boy is the whole sub- 
ject of the poem. It is full of the metaphysics of sor- 
row, and of the fantastic play of words and thoughts with 
which the Elizabethans described the poetry of unhappy 
love. It seems plain from many passages that Tennyson 
had read at this time the Sonnets of the Amourists, and 
the work of the love-poets of the age of James the First. 
Here is one of these passages : 



It was ill-done to part you, Sisters fair ; 

Love's arms were wreath'd about the neck of Hope, 

And Hope kiss'd Love, and Love drew in her breath 

In that close kiss, and drank her whisper'd tales. 

They said that Love would die when Hope was gone. 

And Love mourn'd long, and sorrow'd after Hope ; 

At last she sought out Memory, and they trod 

The same old paths where Love had walk'd with Hope, 

And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears. 



This metaphysic of fantasy — an embroidery of the per- 
sonified passions as on a tapestry, and represented in 
successive pictures — does not stand alone. It is fre- 



58 Tennyson 



quent in this early poem, and it became in after-times, 
but greatly improved in its usage, a habit of the poet. 
Many instances of it occur in /;/ Memoriam. 

The lover's sorrow is also mingled up with Nature. 
Every natural description illustrates and reflects the 
changing moods of the characters : so early did Tenny- 
son begin this consistent habit of his art; Two or three 
vivid descriptions and a few happy single lines that iso- 
late natural phenomena, prove how far he had left behind 
him the aimless looseness of the Poems of Two Brothers^ 
but do not prophesy the distinctive power which Tenny- 
son had afterwards over Nature. The one charm of the 
poem is its youthfulness. The lavishness, the want of 
temperance, the inability to stop when enough has been 
said, the welling-over of words, the boyishness of senti- 
ment, the playing at sorrow — while they prove that 
Tennyson was right in withdrawing the poem from pub- 
lication — nevertheless give us pleasure, the pleasure of 
touching youth. 

Next year he wrote Timbuctoo. It is not at all like 
a prize poem, and to be original in a prize poem was 
so audacious that it is a clear proof that Tennyson had 
become conscious of his proper power. He intimated 
no more. Some lines in it are fine, but its main interest 
is that his conception of the subject proves that he had 
now seen that Fable was a great storehouse of poetic 
material. He builds the Timbuctoo of fable ; a vision 
like that of El Dorado. He weaves it through and 
through with spiritual thought. The excitement and 



The Poems of 1830 59 

the method are the same as those he felt and used when 
he began to take up the legend of Arthur. Neither of these 
poems, however, had anything to do with English life, or 
was influenced by the movements of the time. Nor did 
the poet appeal in them to the public. That step was 
made by the volume of 1830, and of what kind it was, 
and moved by what impulses, is now the matter in hand. 
I have maintained that when Keats died there was no 
national excitement in England, no emotional movement 
towards either a social or political betterment of life, no 
care for ideas such as will make a poet feel the thrill of 
humanity in the present. Without that, he may write, 
like Keats, for a time about the past, but he will not 
produce a new poetic world. Well, this excitement of 
the nation was supplied to Tennyson and to Browning. 
The reform movement had now begun and was coming 
to its height. A new religious movement also began, 
and had taken two forms before three years passed by ; 
one towards a greater freedom of religious thought, and 
another towards a vitalising of Church doctrine and 
ritual. Both contained a greater intensity of self-sacri- 
fice than had been known for years, and a greater 
development of practical work for the poor and the 
sorrowful. Both were an extension of the love of man, 
and carried with them an emotion which ran rapidly 
through England. Along with these two opposite ten- 
dencies of religious thought there was, of course, and 
owing to their clashing, an awakening of spiritual doubt, 
questioning and trouble which made a host of men 



6o Tennyson 



interested in or tormented by religion. Traces of this 
are everywhere found in Tennyson. " What am I ? 
Whence have I come ? Whither am I going ? What 
authority have I for any faith ? What has God to do 
with me, or I with God ? What are my duties to man, 
and what is their foundation ? " These were the kind 
of questions which stirred in England, like leaven in 
meal. Excitement then in politics, in social ques- 
tions, in religious questions, was rife in this country 
when Tennyson and Browning began to write. Their 
youth was stirred by a series of national impulses. This 
was the atmosphere in which they wrote their first poems ; 
and their after-poems were filled with it. Thus first 
poetry again began, like Pygmalion's marble, to move and 
speak, stepped down from its pedestal and took its share 
in the life of men and women. The blood grew warm 
and quick within its veins. 

And now the question is : Of what kind will the first 
poems be — or, rather, of what kind were Tennyson's — 
under these conditions ? They will not be directly 
written on the special national excitements. The poet 
is kindled by these excitements, but he does not write 
on them. The stirring in his heart which he receives 
from the nation he applies to his own subjects, those 
which are personal to him. The primary emotion is 
national, the secondary emotions are personal, but it is 
on the secondary that he writes. Even when he makes a 
poem upon that which was affecting all thoughtful men in 
the nation — on the religious problem — the poem is not 



The Poems of 1830 61 



written to express the national feeling, but to express 
his own. And this is the case in that quasi-religious 
poem in the volume of 1830, which Tennyson calls the 
Confessions of a Sensitive Mindy and which ends 



O weary life ! O weary death ! 
O spirit and heart made desolate ! 
O damned vacillating state ! 



Keats could not, for one moment, have got into the 
condition in which this conclusion and the poem which 
precedes it were possible. When Tennyson in 1830 
wrote his sonnet to J. M. K., in excitement about the 
work this friend of his was to do as a preacher among 
mankind ; when he said that his friend would be a 
" soldier-priest, no sabbath drawler of old saws," but 
spurred at heart with fieriest energy to embattell and to 
wall about his cause 



With ironed-worded proof, hating to hark 

The humming of the drowsy pulpit-drone 

Half God's good sabbath, while the worn-out clerk 

Brow-beats his desk below, 



he was moved by the emotion of the religious revival 
which had begun in England. Such an emotion could 
not have been felt by Keats. Had Keats, indeed, lived 
longer it would have been different, for he began before 
he died to step out of his isolation in beauty and to wish 
to be a soldier of humanity ; and he would have been 
profoundly moved by the new impulses in English life. 



62 Tennyson 



Nor would it have been possible for Keats, in his time, 
to write the English War Songs^ or the National Song at 
the end of the volume of 1830, which are filled with 
a young man's patriotic pride, and with a contempt of 
the French people. They are not fine things, but they 
illustrate my contention — that the poets had again taken 
interest in the present ; that the nation, being new-born 
into fresh emotion, was making a new ground for poetry. 
That is one thing to say. Another is that the poet 
will not altogether get rid of the condition of things in 
which he has lived since he was a boy. He will write a 
number of poems in his first books which will be of the 
same class as those written by the men and women of 
the exhausted time, pretty, graceful, powerless poems, 
without any forward outlook. And of these a good deal 
of this first volume of Tennyson's is made up. The first 
poem, entitled Claj'ibel^ is of this quality. So are most 
of the poems addressed to various imagined women — 
such as Lilian^ Madeline^ Adeline. So also are the Songs, 
which do not even vaguely prophesy the excellence Ten- 
nyson afterwards reached in this kind of poetry. It is 
true, the refined choice of words in these poems, their 
over-wrought phrasing, are better than the conventional 
grace and slippered wording of the contemporary verse ; 
but they are still of that mould into which Mrs. Hemans 
and the rest cast their poetry. The poet, even though 
he is to become a leader of fresh song, is then like one of 
those figures we see in the mediaeval pictures of the 
Resurrection at the Last Judgment, half risen from the 



The Poems of 1830 63 

earth, their heads and arms uplifted to the new light of 
life, their legs still clasped by the encumbering earth. 

This was exactly the case with Tennyson. He is 
partly sunk in the old clay, but he is partly risen. There 
are poems in this book of 1830 in which the fresh utter- 
ance of a new Maker of song is ringing clear, in which 
he has got free altogether of the past. And one of the 
earliest things he wrote (" written very early in life " is 
his own addition to the title) is one of these prophetic 
things. This is the Ode to Me?nory. We hear in it faint 
echoes of Coleridge, or of Milton ; but we also hear a 
clear, original, and dominant note of his own, belonging 
to none ; self-felt, self-invented ; thought and emotion 
unknown before ; music and phrasing new. No wonder, 
having done this as a boy, he felt himself a man apart, 
with the laurel of Apollo within his reach. When we 
hear a verse like this : 



Listening the lordly music flowing from 
The illimitable years,* 



we know that he who wrote it has begun work which has 
the power to continue. 

And when we read this description of a natural land- 
scape, we know that we are listening to one who will 
reveal to us Nature under a new light, and new worlds 
of Nature. He is still speaking to Memory : 

* This is also used in Timbuctoo. 



64 Tennyson 



Thou wert not nursed by the waterfall 

Which ever sounds and shines 
A pillar of white light upon the wall 

Of purple cliffs, aloof descried : 

Come from the woods that belt the gray hillside, 
The seven elms, the poplars four, 
That stand beside my father's door. 
And chiefly from the brook that loves 
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand. 
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, 
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn, 

In every elbow and turn. 
The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland, 

O ! hither lead thy feet ! 
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat 
Of the thick fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 

Upon the ridged wolds. 

The metrical movement is untrained, there is not 
sufficient rejection of the superfluous ; but there is the 
original thing. The sight of Nature and its expression 
owe something to Wordsworth and Keats. But beyond 
the echoes there is the sounding of a new horn on 
Apollo's hill. Nor does this stand alone. There are at 
least twelve poems in this first book which are like the 
gates into a fresh world, ^nd better work at every point 
than this Ode to Memory. Among these are Mariana, Rec- 
ollections of the Arabian Nights, The Poet, The Dying 
Swan, Love and Death, Oriana, The Sleeping Beauty, The 
Sea Fairies. 

In these Tennyson's picture-poetry begins in a num- 
ber of elaborate studies of Nature, with one figure in 
them to give them human interest ; and these studies 



Tiic 1 OC1I15 OI 1830 65 

are of two kinds. Some are carried through a poem of 
many verses, like Mariana^ where the one landscape is 
described at various times of day and night, where birds 
and animals correspondent to the emotion are intro- 
duced, and where all are led up to one lonely figure. 
Others are in short single verses — a whole landscape set 
in the frame of a quatrain — like those composed in 1833 
for The Palace of Art. This was, on both its sides, a 
new method. The previous poets had not invented it. 
Here is a passage from Mariana of pure landscape. I 
quote from the volume of 1830 : 

About a stone-cast from the wall, 

A sluice with blacken'd waters slept, 
And o'er it many, round and small, 

The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. 
Hard by a poplar shook alway. 

All silver-green with gnarled bark ; 

For leagues no other tree did dark 
The level waste, the rounding gray. 

The last two lines illustrate his homelike love for a 
land of wide horizons and low skies, fringed with hum- 
ble hills, such as he saw continually in the fen country ; 
such as he pencils out in one rapid sketch in Oriana, 
where in only two lines we see and hear the wintry world 
with equal vividness — 

When the long dun wolds are ribb'd with snow. 
And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow. 

There is already the full-mouthed vowel-music of Ten- w 
nyson ; one of the characteristics of his careful art in 



66 Tennyson 



words, of which no one before, except Milton, was so 
skilled, so conscious, or so continuous a mastier. A 
whole essay might be written on this part of his technic 
art ; and it is worth a reader's while, for once at least, to 
collect together these great vowel-passages from his 
poems. 

The Recollections of the Arabia7i Nights is another of 
these landscape poems. Every verse is a picture of a 
new reach of the river Tigris ; the sound of every word 
is studied in them, so that the words in their varied 
sound should do the same office for the poetry that the 
various tones of colour do for a painting. And to ac- 
complish this the better, he now invented, but far too 
much and with a luxuriance which he afterwards pruned 
away, a number of double adjectives, chosen as much 
for their sound as for their images. All the poems 
about women are filled with these — sudden-curved, 
golden-netted, forward-flowing, silver-chiming, fountain- 
fragrant, shadow-chequered, hollow-vaulted, sable-sheeny 
— and very many more : a dangerous trick to gain, and 
one from which it is difficult to escape. Tennyson loved 
these double-shotted words, but he had power enough 
afterwards to bring their use into moderation. 

There is another poem. The Sea Fairies^ not much in 
itself, but also prophetic of a new world in poetry. 
The first three lines in the song of the Sirens is the first 
true note of the singing quality, both in metre and in 
unity of theme, which afterwards made the songs of 
Tennyson so distinguished. The other songs in this 



J 

1 



The Poems of 1830 67 

book might have been written by half a dozen other 
men — they belong to the merely graceful — but this is his 
own, and its quality is altogether of a new kind. It 
begins : 

Whither away, whither away, whither away ? Fly no more : 
Whither away with the swinging sail ? whither away with the oar ? 
Whither away from the high green field and the happy blossoming 
shore ? 



This is the easy movement of a metrist's wing in an 
early flight, singing all the time. I say an early flight, 
for his metrical movement, as most of the poems in this 
book declare, was at this time broken, halting, and un- 
musical. Coleridge said, when he read these poems, 
that Tennyson had " begun to write verses without very 
well understanding what metre is " ; and indeed he ar- 
rived at the excellence he did attain in metre more by 
study than by natural gift. But the capability of fine 
artistic song is as clearly shadowed forth in The Sea 
Fairies, as the full sunlight is by the colours of the 
dawn. What it was to become, after some years of 
training, any one may read in the song in The Lotos- 
Eaters, of which this poem is, as it were, the first sketch. 

Moreover, there is another characteristic of Tenny- 
son's future poetry in The Sea Faii-ies. It is the first of 
the small classical studies in which he excelled, and it is 
built on the same foundation as the rest of them. When 
he takes a classical subject he builds it up with one 
underlying thought which, running through the whole of 



68 Tennyson 

the poem, gives it unity. He chooses a simple thought, 
common to all mankind ; felt by the ancients, but to 
which he gives continual touches and variations which 
grow out of modern life, and out of his own soul. This 
is the case with Ulysses^ CEnone^ Tithonus^ and the rest. 
But the unity and simplicity of the thought, its mingled 
ancient and modern air, and its careful inweaving into 
the whole body of the story, make these classical things 
of his unique. No one has ever done them in the same 
fashion, and the fashion is extraordinarily interesting. 

In The Sea Fairies the thought is the weariness of the 
ceaseless labour of the world. " Why toil so much for 
so little ? Take the joy of rest and love. Sleep, before 
the great sleep." We shall see how this excessively 
simple thought is splendidly wrought out in The Lotos- 
Eaters. It is enough now to say that this is the first of 
these classical poems, and, so far as method is con- 
cerned, it is similar to them all. This, then, is also a 
new thing. 

Once more, on this poem, we have in it and The 
Mystic the first clear sound of the blank verse of Tenny- 
son. These lines from The Mystic belong to him : 

He, often lying broad awake, and yet 
Remaining in the body, and apart 
In intellect and power and will, hath heard 
Time flowing in the middle of the night, 
And all things creeping to a day of doom. 

Still more prophetic of a new blank verse are the lines 
at the beginning of The Sea Fairies : 



The Poems of 1830 69 

Slow sail'd the weary mariners and saw, 

Between the green brink and the running foam, 

White limbs unrobed in a crystal air, 

Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest 

To little harps of gold ; and, while they mused, 

Whispering to each other half in fear. 

Shrill music reach'd them on the middle sea. 

No one, with an ear, can mistake the novelty of the 
verse. It is plainly done by one who had read Milton, 
but it is not Milton's way ; it is Tennyson's own ; and 
it is charming to hear the first note of a music which has 
delighted us so long in two lines like these : 

Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw 
Between the green brink and the running foam. 

These, then, are the new things in the poems of 1830. 
It remains to speak of his conception of what a poet 
was, and of himself as poet. 

I have said that Tennyson was conscious all his life 
of being set apart as a prophet, and of the duties which 
he owed to humanity. His life, in his own mind, was 
weighted with a sense of these duties. He would have 
quoted for himself that noble passage in which Milton 
pictures himself and realises what sort of character the 
lofty poet must possess. He would have felt with that 
equally noble passage in The Prelude^ where Wordsworth 
describes himself as consecrated to his work by Nature 
and by God. And it marks that change in the temper 
of England of which I wrote at the beginning, that 
Tennyson could not conceive, like Keats, of his work as 
done for beauty's sake alone, but also for the sake of 



70 Tennyson 



humankind. The new earnestness and excitement of 
the world compelled him to conceive of his work with 
the same intensity as Wordsworth when, writing under 
the enrapturing and fresh enthusiasm of humanity and 
buoyant with youthful vigour, he came at first to Gras- 
mere. Wordsworth paints his soul, its outlook and its 
energy, in undying lines at the end of The Recluse ; and 
the comparison of these (which I commend to my read- 
ers) with Tennyson's verses on The Poet is full of de- 
lightful interest. 

In that poem, Tennyson lays down, and out of his 
own inward experience, what he conceived himself to 
be, and how he conceived his work ; and he never 
abandoned, betrayed, or enfeebled his conception. It 
is a remarkable utterance for so young a man, weighty 
with that steadiness of temper which, if it diminished 
spontaneity in his art, yet gave it a lasting power. 

The poet in a golden clime was born, 

With golden stars above ; 
Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 

The love of love. 

That is the beginning, and the first needs of the poet's 
nature could scarcely be better expressed. Then he 
speaks of the clear insight into God and man which is 
the best gift of the poet. 

He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, 

He saw thro' his own soul. 
The marvel of the everlasting will, 

An open scroll, 

Before him lay. 



The Poems of 1830 71 

Then his thoughts, blown like arrow-seeds over the 
whole world with melodies and light, take root, and be- 
come flowers in the hearts of men, till high desires are 
born, and truth is multiplied on truth, 

And thro' the wreaths of floating dark upcurled, 
Rare sunrise flow'd. 

And in that sunrise. Freedom clothed in wisdom came 
upon Man, and shook his spirit, and ruined anarchies 
and oppressions. This was Tennyson's youthful con- 
ception of his work, and we should never forget it when 
we read his poetry, though we are tempted sometimes to 
think that he forgot this last part of it himself. I quote 
the final verses, and from the book of 1830. Their note 
is new. Their power, in contrast with the light verse 
that was contemporary with them, is the revelation of a 
poetic resurrection : 

And Freedom rear'd in that august sunrise 

Her beautiful, bold brow, 
When rites and forms before his burning eyes 

Melted like snow. 

There was no blood upon her maiden robes 

Sunn'd by those orient skies ; 
But round about the circles of the globes 

Of her keen eyes 

* And in the bordure of her robe was writ 
Wisdom — a name to shake 
Hoar anarchies, as with a thunder-fit. 
And when she spake, 

* Recast in 1842. 

And ia her raiment's hem was traced in flame 

Wisdom, a name to shake 
All evil dreams of power— a sacred name. 



^2 



Tennyson 



Her words did gather thunder as they ran, 
And as the lightning to the thunder 

Which follows it, riving the spirit of man, 
Making earth wonder, 

So was their meaning to her words. No sword 

Of wrath her right arm hurl'd, 
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word 

She shook the world. 





CHAPTER II 
THE POEMS OF 1833 

THREE years after the volume of 1830, Tennyson 
published the little book of 1833, containing thirty 
new poems. In this second volume he wrought still 
further at the new veins he had struck, and turned their 
ore into finer shapes. But he not only developed work 
he had already begun ; he found fresh and different 
veins of poetry, opened these also, and made out of their 
gold new creations full of the spirit of youth hastening 
to a greater excellence. Evolution then of the subjects 
discovered in 1830 — creation of new subjects in 1833 — 
these are the matter of this chapter. 

But first, it is well to mark how the artist, as artist, 
grows. He cannot cease inventing ; new things, new 
forms spring up under his hand ; ever uncontent be- 
cause the unattainable of Beauty lures him on. " If 
thou givest me," cries Beauty in his heart, " a thousand 
shapes, there are yet a million more which thou mayest 
invent for me, and yet I shall not be exhausted." He 
who feels that allurement and hears that cry has the art- 

73 



74 Tennyson 



ist's temper ; he who can embody what he feels and 
hears, in ever varying forms, till old age touch him with 
inability, is the artist. He moves " from well to better, 
daily self-surpast," till he has no more power. We know 
when his power is lessening, for then he begins to repeat 
himself. We know that it still exists, however feebly, 
when, in the midst of repetitions, new things now and 
then appear. 

And it is one of the happy things in Tennyson's 
career, that even till he was past eighty years of age, 
this creativeness — that is, this power of being inflamed 
with the love of Beauty and animated by her into crea- 
tion — did not altogether die. In the very last volume 
he published there appeared a poem called The Gleain^ 
which, if it was written shortly before the book was is- 
sued, was a new and beautiful blossom on his ancient 
tree. Those who, walking in an English park, have 
come upon an oak, broken off short by age or storm and 
hollow within, but whose rugged gnarls send forth leaves 
as delicate as those of its childhood, must have often 
thought, " There is the image of the great artist in his 
old age, of the great musician, the great painter, the 
great poet " ; and though Tennyson does not stand 
among the very mightiest, yet he had this singular and 
noble power of fresh creation in old age. 

We are sure to find this creativeness in his youth. It 
appeared, as we have seen, in 1830, and I have discussed 
some forms of it in the previous chapter. Two forms of 
it, however, I omitted — one, the drawing of " charac- 



The Poems of 1833 75 

ters " ; the other, the drawing of Nature. Both of these 
were more fully worked out in the volume of 1833. 
Both are new in manner, and interesting beyond them- 
selves. 

The types of character were drawn, each apart, like 
solitary statues. As a young man, he chose women on 
whom to try his prentice hand, and we have a series of 
these pictures, with fanciful names written underneath 
them. They are lifeless as women, lay figures with 
elaborate dresses ; word-painted, nothing but words. 
There are no surprises in these characters, nothing inex- 
plicable, nothing unexpected, nothing veiled, no pro- 
found simplicity, nothing which recalls a woman. They 
are, above all, logically worked out ; one verse opens 
into another in an intellectual order. We can predict 
what is coming — as if their subjects moved in accord- 
ance to law. It was like a young man to try this, but it 
was a pity he did not prefer to draw his college com- 
panions, for the one man's character that he does out- 
line is a fairly-painted type. Here are two verses of it ; 

Most delicately hour by hour 
He canvass'd human mysteries ; 
And trod on silk, as if the winds 
Blew his own praises in his eyes, 
And stood aloof from other minds 
In impotence of fancied power. 

With lips depress'd as he were meek, 
Himself unto himself he sold ; 
Upon himself himself did feed : 
Quiet, dispassionate and cold. 



76 . Tennyson 



And other than his form of creed, 
With chisell'd features clear and sleek. 

But even that is more like an exercise in the descrip- 
tion of a type than like the picture of a living man. 
Character is shown by clashing with character. It may 
" form itself in silence," but it is ignorant of itself till it 
can speak to others and answer their speech. Hence 
the Maker, who is bound to paint men and women, 
almost always paints them in movement with or against 
one another. Tennyson did that fairly afterwards, but 
never superbly. The effort to make a type was always 
too much with him. The men and women in the Idylls 
of the King want life. The personal edges and angles 
have been worn away in order to establish the type. 
Enid, Tristram, Vivien, Arthur, even Lancelot who is 
the most living, are often like those photographs which 
are made by photographing the faces of a series of 
politicians or philosophers or artists one on the top of 
another. We get the general type — or they say we get 
it — but we do not get a man. The men and women who 
are most actual in Tennyson's poetry are those whom 
he printed out of every-day life, and in the sphere of 
the common affections and troubles of mankind — in 
stories like Enoch Arden^ in country idylls like The 
Gardener'' s Daughter^ Dora^ The Brook ; in the Lincoln- 
shire dialect poems, which bring before us the most 
living persons in his books. 

Nevertheless, the attempt Tennyson made at this time 
to draw separate characters is in harmony with the age 



The Poems of 1833 11 

in which he began to write. Character-making was 
once a favourite species of poetry, but it had not been 
done well since the time of Pope. None of the greater 
poets from Wordsworth to Keats took up this special 
form of art. But Tennyson, and with greater power 
Browning, deliberately insulated and painted a number 
of characters, and of generalised types of character, as 
if a certain driving force from without, a tendency of 
popular thought, urged them to make much of the indi- 
vidual, as if society had concluded that it was to find its 
betterment in the support of strong individualities. 
And indeed this was the case in England in 1833. As 
great as the tendency is at present to collectivism, so 
great was the tendency then to individualism. It grew 
steadily in politics, even in art and religion, for thirty 
years, and then it began to abate. Large crowds of men 
laid all their lives in the hands of great leaders of 
thought ; and thus, while they maintained the necessity 
for strong individualities, lessened individualism by 
collecting in mass under the banner of one man ; so 
curiously and so certainly do extremes cut their own 
throats. The individual, the powerful character, is 
everything, said Carlyle, and said it for more than forty 
years. This was partly a protest against the past dul- 
ness of society, it was still more the protest of the fear 
of the cultivated man that in the coming democracy all 
men would be levelled and a dull monotony rule su- 
preme. Every valley, they cried, will be exalted and 
every mountain and hill brought low ; there will be no 



78 Tennyson 



varied scenery in humanity. We hear that dread ex- 
pressed by Tennyson in Locksley Hall : 

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore 
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more. 

The verses which follow, the hero's desire to break 
all links of habit, to escape to summer isles, " where the 
passions, cramped no longer, shall have scope and 
breathing space " ; where men shall be free to make 
themselves, continue the same thought. He had then in 
1842, when Locksley Hall was published, realised fully 
the desire for individualism which was then rife in Eng- 
land. It was this force which pressed him in 1830 and 
1833 into the writing of characters. 

Secondly, I have drawn attention to the new way of 
painting Nature which Tennyson developed, and to the 
new world of Nature to which he introduced us. He 
composed his Nature into pictures, a thing not done by 
Byron, Shelley, or Keats, or at least not so deliberately, 
not so consciously. This picture-composing of Nature 
is carried to much greater excellence in the volume of 
1833. I might contrast Mariana in the South, a poem 
of 1833, with Mariana of 1830, but it would not prove 
my point — that his power of nature-painting had in- 
creased. It suggests, however, another point with regard 
to Tennyson's natural description. Mariana in the 
South is not so good as its predecessor ; and I believe 
that the reason of its comparative failure is that the 
scene is laid in the South, and Tennyson was so English, 



The Poems of 1833 79 

and so much the child of long habit, that when he got 
outside of this country, even outside of the landscape 
which surrounded him year after year, he did not choose 
so happily as in England the right thing to say in order 
to give the sentiment of the landscape. This is, how- 
ever, subject to exception. What I say is true concern- 
ing his foreign landscapes, whenever he is working direct 
from Nature, or composing out of things he has seen. 
It is not true when he is deliberately inventing his land- 
scape out of his own head, and with reference to his 
subject — as he is in CEnone or The Lotos- Eaters. There 
he paints the inward vision ; and he does it with noble 
clearness. But we understand that the landscape is 
imagined, that it has never been seen. 

With this exception, it is only the accustomed land- 
scape of his own land, studied from the life, that he sees 
clearly and describes well ; and this belongs to his char- 
acter as well as to his art. He was a homelike person, 
and it was not till Nature had for many years slowly 
" crept into the study of his imagination " that he could 
paint her with the affectionate finish he desired. Rapid 
impressions received in travel he could not, like Byron 
or Shelley, record with excellence. The poem called 
The Daisy^ in which he attempts this work, is, with the 
exception of one verse, a failure. But that which had 
endeared itself to him for years, which amid a thousand 
varieties of aspect had unity of sentiment, the landscape 
of Lincolnshire, the fens and the meres and sea ; the 
landscape of Surrey, Kent, Hampshire, and the Isle of 



8o Tennyson 



Wight — of the chalk and the sandstone — this he did to 
perfection. In The Palace o/Ar^,the landscapes are on 
the tapestry, and of course are themselves pictures. All 
the more then they illustrate his way of looking at Nature 
— his turn for composing her like a painter. Each 
landscape is done in four lines, and with the exception 
of two, they might all be in Lincolnshire. I quote from 
the poem as altered in 1842 : 

One seem'd all dark and red — a tract of sand, 

And some one pacing there alone, 
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land, 

Lit with a low large moon. 

The second is not Lincolnshire : 

One show'd an iron coast and angry waves. 

You seem'd to hear them climb and fall. 
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, 

Beneath the windy wall. 

That seems to be a piece of the coast of Yorkshire, 
outside of his own country. It is good, but if he had 
belonged to the Yorkshire coast, and loved it like the 
glimmering lands of Lincoln with the low-hung moon, 
the second line would have been better done. The next 
is full Lincolnshire, and might be a motto for the art 
of De Wint : 

And one, a full fed river winding slow 

By herds upon an endless plain. 
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 

With shadow-streaks of rain. 

The next is from the South. " Hoary in the wind " is 
the vision of the gray underside of the olive-leaf tossed 



The Poems of 1833 81 



upwards over a whole hillside by the gust into the 
sunlight. 

And one, the reapers at their sultry toil. 

In front they bound the sheaves. Behind 
Were realms of upland, prodigal in oil, 

And hoary to the wind. 

The whole is, however, not clear ; he does not see it as 
vividly as the rest, and there is little sentiment in it. 

But the next — could it be better ? And how drenched 
it is in the sentiment of England ! 

And one, an English home — gray twilight pour'd 

On dewy pastures, dewy trees, 
Softer than sleep — all things in order stored, 

A haunt of ancient Peace. 

This is Tennyson in love with his subject, and the 
quality of the poetry rises with his love. Moreover, it 
is delightful to see him stretch out his hand to Virgil, 
who was as fond of his country as Tennyson of England 
— " Softer than sleep." 

Again, we stand on the long shallow sands of the 
sea-coast near his early home, and there is no better, 
briefer, yet more finished picture in all his work : 

A still salt pool, loclc'd in with bars of sand, 
Left on the shore ; that hears all night 

Their plunging seas draw backward from the land 
Their moon-led waters white. 

These are properly pictures, but the immense improve- 
ment in the description of Nature which took place be- 
tween 1830 and 1833 is more fully seen in poems where 

Nature and human affections are woven together, as in 
6 



82 Tennyson 



The May Queen^ and better still in The Miller s Daughter 
both of this year. The girl's cottage is on the hillside 
above the valley and the meadowy stream. The land is 
full of flowers and grass. The cowslip and the crowfoot 
are all over the hill, the honeysuckle is round the porch, 
the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers grov/ beside the meadow 
trenches ; " And the wild marsh-marigold shines like 
fire in swamps and hollows gray." Where in the world 
can we place this except in England — half in Lincoln, 
half in Kent ? 

Fond as he was of the common flowers, he was even 
fonder of the birds. The red cock crows, in this poem, 
from the farm upon the hill : 

The building rook '11 caw from the windy tall elm-tree, 

And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea, 

And the swallow 'ill come again with summer o'er the wave. 

Every line is a picture in a new style of art, something 
which had not been done before in this fashion and 
finish ; no, not even by Wordsworth whose love of flowers 
and birds is less pictorial, but more instinct with the 
life of the thing he describes. Nor could Wordsworth, 
who is the mountain poet, have made us feel the land- 
scape of the lower English lands as Tennyson does — 
with our pity for the dying girl woven through it all — 
in these four lines, so clear and fine : 

When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning light. 
You '11 never see me more in the long gray fields at night ; 
When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool. 
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool. 



I 



The Poems of 1833 83 

Still more of England and of the scenery of the 
chalk-lands, which whosoever loves, loves well, is all the 
landscape in The Miller s Daughter. In this poem, as 
in the last, there is no special picture made of the land- 
scape, for the human interest is first. But we might, 
culling from verse to verse our indications, paint the 
whole of the country-side round the mill, so careful is 
Tennyson in his drawing, so deeply has the scene sunk 
into his imagination. It is owing to this full digestion, 
in contemplation, of the landscape, that the human fig- 
ures — the miller, the lover, the maiden — are so much 
felt, as we read, to be at union with the natural world 
round them, even to be partly made into what they are by 
dwelling with it for so long. Tennyson, who himself, 
with regard to the Nature he described, was in part a 
product of that Nature, knew how to do this artistic 
thing, and it gives an extraordinary unity to a great 
number of his poems. Had he not absorbed his scenery 
in this fashion, he could not have had the capacity, not 
only to see the minuter things, as the colour of ash-buds 
in March, a capacity which was not fully developed till 
ten years after this volume, but to give, in a line or two, 
the very image of the whole country its essential marks : 

The white chalk-quarry from the hill 
Gleam'd to the flying moon by fits — 

On the chalk-hill the bearded grass 
Is dry and dewless. Let us go. 

Night and day, the whole country lies before us. This 



84 Tennyson 



is one of the great art-powers, the power of choosing 
out of a multitude of impressions that single thing 
which will awaken all the rest of the landscape, with its 
sentiment, before the eyes. It is partly natural gift, 
but it is also the result of long indrinking of the special 
landscape, and years of the special landscape, and 
years of inward contemplation of it. And in this matter 
of living with Nature in one place for years, and out of 
the incessant observation of love of actually creating 
in poetry a portion of England, with its birds and flowers, 
its skies, woodland, meadows, and streams, and so vividly 
and truly that every touch tells ; every adjective, the 
sound of the words, the pauses in the line, enhancing 
the life of the whole description — for this reproduction 
of a whole land and of the final impression made by it 
after many years upon the soul, and for the power of 
making us feel the land as the poet felt it — we must 
get back, if we would find a comparison, to Wordsworth. 
Wordsworth did for the Lake country what Tennyson 
did for southern England and the Fenland. But Words- 
worth did not do this part of his work with as much 
specialised power as Tennyson. 

This is the first thing to say of his landscape. The 
second concerns his invented landscape, but this will 
be more fitly treated of in the chapter on the Classical 
poems. 

Meanwhile, Tennyson began two new kinds of poetry 
in this book of 1833. The first was the treatment of 
moral questions under the symbolism of poetry. Of 



The Poems of 1833 85 

this symbolic poetry he afterwards produced a few ex- 
amples. The Vision of Sin^ made in 1842, is one. There 
is a dream in In Memoriain which may be said to be 
another example. Within the main allegory of the Idylls 
of the King there are other examples to be found. The 
dream in Sea Dreams is another. Of these there are not 
many, for this species of poetry, which embodies a moral 
problem in a highly ornamented vision, is as exceedingly 
difficult to do well, as it is exceedingly easy to do badly. 
When Tennyson did it, he gave all his powers to it, and 
was not content till he had wrought it, by change after 
change, into the most careful and skilful finish. There is 
only one poem in this volume of 1833 which is in this 
manner. It is The Palace of Art^ and it stands out clear 
— a new thing, a fresh effort. 

As we read it in the volume of 1833, it has many weak 
lines. So far as composition goes, it is often all awry. 
Often we say to ourselves, " Would this were better." 
But as we read it in the volume of 1842, when it had 
received eight years of recasting and polishing, it is one 
of the most perfect of Tennyson's poems. To compare 
the first draft of this poem with the second, or to com- 
pare the first draft of (Enone with the second, is not only 
to receive a useful lesson in the art of poetry — it is also 
to understand, far better than by any analysis of his life, 
a great part of Tennyson's character ; his impatience 
for perfection, his steadiness in pursuit of it, his power 
of taking pains, the long intellectual consideration he 
gave to matters which originated in the emotions, his 



86 Tennyson 



love of balancing this and that form of his thought 
against one another, and when the balancing was done, 
the unchangeableness of his acceptance of one form, 
and of his rejection of another ; and finally, correlative 
with these qualities, his want of impulse and rush in 
song, as in life — English, not Celtic at all. These quali- 
ties appear in his elaborate recasts of his poems, and 
when we compare the recasts with their originals, the 
man, as well as the artist, seems to grow before us into 
actual being. 

But, returning to the poem, it marks the first rising in 
his mind of thought on the graver questions of life ; not 
thought on the world around him, or on any question as 
it affects humanity, but on a question concerning himself 
and his duty as an artist. " Shall I love art and beauty 
which I shape in art for the sake of art alone, beauty for 
beauty only ; knowledge only for the sake of the beauty 
it brings to me ? Shall I live, apart from the world of men, 
and work with no desire to help, exalt, or console the blind 
and ugly herd of men ? " This is a question that we ask 
in the present day, and some answer, " Yes, beauty only, 
beauty for its own sake — art without any aim of love in 
it — art in isolation from mankind ! " And they retire to 
a sheltered solitude and sing their song alone, refusing 
to hear, behind their hushed tapestries, the cry of human 
sorrow for human love. What is their fate ? They lose 
love, for love is only gained by loving ; and they lose 
the beauty they desired to grasp, for beauty is the child 
of love. Outside the power of loving man, no beauty 



The Poems of 1833 87 

lasts. And finally, having none to love, and therefore 
nothing to take them out of themselves, they are wholly 
thrown on themselves. Their only companion is their 
self, and this is absolute horror and dismay. 

This, then, was his subject, and he puts it in the In- 
troduction. I write, he says, a sort of allegory of a soul 
that loved beauty only, and good and knowledge only 
for their beauty, and who shut out Love : 

And he that shuts out Love, in turn shall be 
Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie 
Howling in outer darkness. 

It is a good subject for an essay or a sermon, but when 
an artist seizes it as the subject of a poem it must first 
be filled with human passion ; and secondly it must be 
ornamented with lovely images. Passion is given to it 
by Tennyson by making the soul a person who goes 
through pride to dreadful pain, and through pain into 
repentance. Beauty is given to it by the description of 
the palace which embodies all the various arts and wis- 
dom of the world in imaginative symbolism. And surely 
no more superb and lovely house was ever built by the 
wit of man. Take two verses out of many :* 

Four courts I made — east, west, and south and north, 

In each a squared lawn, where from 
The golden gorge of dragons spouted forth 

A flood of fountain-foam. 

* I have quoted the passages in this poem from the revised version 
of 1842. No poem of Tennyson's underwent more revision. 



88 Tennyson 



And round the cool green courts there ran a row 
Of cloisters, branch'd like mighty woods, 

Echoing all night to that sonorous flow 
Of spouted fountain-floods. 

The vowels roll and ring, and the ornament is lovely — 
ornament which Tennyson takes care to introduce be- 
tween his successive representations of the state of the 
soul. The whole palace is dedicated to loveliness. The 
rooms are filled with the great painters' art ; all fair 
landscape is there, and pictures of great romance from 
Christian history, from Arabia, India, Greece, and 
Rome ; portraits of the great poets ; and on the floors, 
in choicely planned mosaic, is wrought the human tale 
of the wide world's history ; while all philosophy and 
knowledge — in the chiming bells, and in melodies and 
in the lights that lit the domes — were heard and real- 
ised. There lived the soul alone unto herself. 

And " while the world runs round and round," I said, 
" Reign thou apart, a quiet king — " 

She took her throne : 
She sat betwixt the shining Oriels, 
To sing her songs alone. 

Communing with herself : ' ' All these are mine. 

And let the world have peace or wars, 
'T is one to me." 

" I take possession of man's mind and deed, 

I care not what the sects may brawl. 
I sit as God, holding no form of creed, 

But contemplating all." 



The Poems of 1833 89 



Full oft the riddle of the painful earth 

Flash'd thro' her as she sat alone. 
Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth, 

And intellectual throne. 

Then comes the punishment, full of human interest, 
and wrought with an emotion which lifts it above the 
level of mere symbolism. Despair, confusion of mind, 
fear and hatred of solitude, self-scorn, terrible silence, 
hatred of life and death, entombment in fire within, fell 
on her. At last she cried : 

' ' What is it that will take away my sin 
• And save me lest I die ? " 

And out of the repentant cry came escape from the 
dread comradeship of her self. " I will return to humil- 
ity and to love, to lowly life with men and women. 

' Make me a cottage, in the vale,' she said, 
' Where I may mourn and pray ; ' 

for ' love is of the valley,' and when love is learned I 
will return to my palace ; for when I love, and return 
with others there, bringing all I love with me to enjoy 
with me — the beauty which turned to corruption when I 
was alone will live again in glory." 

This is Tennyson's confession of the duties of his art, 
and of the law of its practice ; and it is characteristic of 
this conclusion that now for the first time he begins that 
poetry of common human life, of the daily love of child 
and lover and wife and father and mother, of the ordi- 
nary sorrows and joys of men and women, which he 



QO Tennyson 



wove all his life long with so much sweetness, tender- 
ness, and power, in homespun thread and colour, that 
there is no class, of whatever rank and knowledge, who 
will not take pleasure in it for all time, who will not love 
him for it. What Wordsworth had done for the begin- 
ning of this century, Tennyson has done for the midst 
of it. He brought us into touch with the general human 
heart in the midst of common life. Shelley, Keats, and 
Byron had not done this, nor Southey, Coleridge, or 
Scott. Since the waters of the Lyrical Ballads had 
streamed into the heart of man, this simple, fruitful sub- 
ject had been neglected by other poets than Words- 
worth ; this subject which lies among the roots of the 
tree of all the arts, and which, when other subjects of a 
more grand or fantastic kind are exhausted, sends its 
ever youthful life into the tree, and renews the arts. Its 
essence, pure and faithful love, is eternal in the human 
heart, and beyond it, in all spirits, and in God Himself. 
It takes in every true sorrow and true joy. It is univer- 
sal, and yet its forms are infinite. It is everywhere, like 
the grass that we love so well, and of which we never 
weary. All men, women, and children feel and under- 
stand it. It varies from the lowest note of the common- 
place to the highest note of imaginative passion, and the 
artist can choose whatever note he pleases to strike. 
There are. many other subjects for the poet ; but if he 
wish to initiate a new world of song, this is one of the 
subjects to which he must devote a part of his work ; 
and we shall find, when we are out of this transition 



The Poems of 1833 91 

period of poetry in which we live at present and are 
fully wearied with its fantasies of Nature and passion 
and words, that the poet who will recreate our song will 
take up again the common love and life of men. He 
will drink of the wayside fountains of humanity. 

It was thus now with Tennyson. He began this vein 
with The May Queen, to which the galloping verse has 
sometimes given an air of sentimentalism. The same 
things would have made a different impression had the 
verse been shorter in line, and a little statelier in form. 
But it is sweet and gracious enough, and the mother, the 
poor pretty child and Robin her lover are our friends. 
He began it also with The Miller s Daughter, a simple 
story of true sweethearting and married love ; but raised 
by the loveliness of the scenery which is inwoven with 
charm and grace into the tale, and by the simplicity of 
the expression, into a steady and grave emotion, worthy 
of a love built to last for life betwixt a man and woman. 
This was the sort of love for which Tennyson cared, for 
which Byron and Shelley did not care, which was not in 
the world where Keats lived at all — but which was in 
Wordsworth's world, and which, after all our excursions 
into phases of passion, is not only the deepest and high- 
est of the affections, but the father and mother of all the 
other loves of earth. It was first in Tennyson's mind, 
but it had many companions. Love of many kinds, joy 
and sorrow of many kinds, as they were felt by the com- 
mon human heart, not only by the great, but by the 
lowly upon earth, were now his interest, and many and 



92 



Tennyson 



lovely were the poems he dedicated to them. Who is 
likely to forget Dora, The Gardener s Daughter, Sea 
Dreams, The Brook, Enoch Arden, and a host of others ? 
This is the democratic element in Tennyson. It is, in 
all its phases, the democracy of the artist. 




CHAPTER III 

THE POEMS OF 1 842 

I DO not think that since the time of Shakspere there 
have been in England any poets so close to the life 
of their own time as Tennyson and Browning ; no, 
not even Wordsworth. Other men, like Pope, have got 
as close, or even closer, to distinct phases of thought or 
classes of society, but Tennyson and Browning settled 
themselves down to paint as far as they could all classes 
and their interests. They did this in different ways, but 
they both had a more universal aim than their prede- 
cessors, and covered a much larger and more various 
extent of ground. Of course they had more opportu- 
nities, more means. The steam-road, with its rapid 
travelling, extended literature to the country and 
brought the country into contact with the towns. The 
poet in London or the poet in the Isle of Wight touched 
a great number of different types of men which would 
have remained unknown to him fifty years before. In 
the same way the manifold forms of natural scenery in 
England or abroad were much more easily brought to 

93 



94 Tennyson 



his knowledge. Moreover Tennyson and Browning 
were lucky in their time. Their present was full of as- 
piration, of ideals, of questioning, of excitement. They 
were like ships floating into a great sea-loch, on a brim- 
ming tide and with a favouring wind. 

Tennyson's interest in the humanity of his own day 
now grew continuously. I shall show in the next chap- 
ter how he could not help modernising the Greek and 
the romantic subjects of which he treated. Keats went 
away to Athens or Florence, and living in an alien age 
forgot his own time. Tennyson said to Ulysses or 
Arthur, " Come down from the ancient days, and live 
with me, here in England." And they came ; and did 
their best to wear the modern dress. When we turn 
from these Greek subjects, we find him altogether Eng- 
lish and modern. A series of poems entered into various 
phases of youthful love. The Gardener s Daughter 
painted with beauty and simplicity the upspringing of 
the fountain of love in a young artist's soul, and car- 
ried it on to marriage. And the love was set in a frame- 
work of soft and flower-haunted English scenery, every 
touch of which, in Tennyson's way, was woven into the 
feelings of the two young hearts. Moreover, though I 
think that the collecting of the story round two pictures 
is awkward, it enables Tennyson to throw over this tale 
of first love the glamour and tenderness of memory. 
The man who tells it has lost the wife of his youth, 
whose picture he shows to his friend. The loveliness of 
unselfish sorrow, which makes remembrance joyful in 



The Poems of 1842 95 

regret, veils the story with the delicate vapour of spirit- 
ual love. At first reading, there is a want of closeness, 
of reality in the feeling described. But when we know 
that it is a mature man recalling what has been when 
she whom he loved of old has long since been in the 
heavenly life, we understand how the clear edges of 
passion melt into ideal mist ; and then we read the 
poem from the poet's point of view. 

The Talking Oak is another poem of youthful love. 
The lover to whom the tree speaks of his maiden and 
who tells the tree of her, is a motive which has been 
often used, but never with greater skill and charm. 
There is a youthful animation, and a happy chivalry in 
rivalry of praise between the lover and the tree, which 
are full of natural grace, that quality somewhat rare in 
Tennyson, who was frequently too academic, too careful 
in his work to attain it. In this poem, also, his in- 
weaving of Nature's heart with the heart of man is more 
than plain. The oak talks to the lover. Nay, the oak 
itself is in love with the maiden. His very sap is stirred 
by her kiss. He drops an acorn on her breast ; and the 
half-jealous lover knows that he need not be jealous. 
Above all, there is no poem more English in all the 
poems of Tennyson. We see the park, the Chase that 
Englishmen of all ranks love so well ; the roofs of the 
great house above the trees ; the wild woodland deep in 
fern, the deer, the mighty trees, the oak which has 
watched so many English generations, so much of Eng- 
lish history — bluff Harry who turned the monks adrift — 



96 Tennyson 



the Roundhead humming his surly hymn — the modish 
beauties of the Court of Anne — the English girl of to- 
day who leaves her novel and piano to race singing 
through the park. This is Tennyson close down to his 
own land, vitally interested in modern life, and the 
thing and its method are new in English poetry. The 
same springtide of love is described in Locksley Hall and 
in the gay delightfulness of The Day-Dream^ with its 
modern applications ; but in Locksley Hall we pass on 
into one of those graver phases of love which Tennyson 
now treated. The hero's love suffers a mean disillusion, 
and he is angry like a boy ; but in Love and Duty the 
matter is more serious. Two love one another, whom 
duty forbids to fulfil their love. Was the love fruitless, 
did it turn to dust ? Because passion was denied, were 
two lives ruined ? No, is the answer of Tennyson. Be- 
cause duty was lord over passion and drove their lives 
apart, love itself, honoured more in giving up than in 
taking an earthly joy contrary to righteousness, lasted in 
both hearts, unstained and lovely, and bettered both 
their lives. The man, emerging from himself, gained the 
higher love, and never knew 

The set gray life, and apathetic end. 

The woman knew, when the parting was over, that all 

Life needs for life is possible to will. 

And happiness came to her, and freedom, and the dis- 
tant light was pure. 



The Poems of 1842 97 

There was a conviction in Tennyson's mind that the 
sanctity of the marriage tie was one of the eternal foun- 
dations of all true personal, social, and national life ; 
that no amount of passionate love excused its breakage. 
This is not the view of the artists in general, but it is 
the view which prevails in the English nation. And 
Tennyson felt and represented it all through his poetry. 
It is a sin against that, with all its excuses also stated, 
which, in his recast of the Arthurian story, overthrows 
the whole life-work of the king and brings about the last 
great battle and the death. It is to establish the true 
idea of marriage as he conceived it that The Princess 
was written ; and a number of other poems, enshrining 
his reverence for long-continued faithfulness through all 
the troubles of domestic life, and culminating in the 
honour he gave to the Crown, chiefly for this reason, 
make him, even more than Wordsworth, the poet of the 
sanctity of marriage. Love and Duty seems to be the 
first of these poems. 

Two things are, however, curious in this poem. One is 
the passionate meeting of the lovers. From Tennyson's 
steady point of view married faith which permitted what 
he relates is not faith at all. And if it was not marriage, 
but some other duty which stood in the way, then the 
intensity of the piece is overdone. That is the first curi- 
ous thing, and the second is the predominance of the 
man in the matter. It is he that feels the most ; it is he 
that directs the whole business of duty. It is he that 
expresses passion, or allows it to be expressed. It is 



98 Tennyson 

he alone who is strong, who alone resists ; and when 
both retire into steady life, he alone does work ; " he is 
most Godlike, being most a man," and he uses his self- 
conquest to improve the world ; but the woman tends 
her flowers, is sadly happy, dreams a little by day, 
dreams more at night, and does no human work at all, 
In The Princess^ Tennyson expands another view, being 
somewhat forced into it by his subject. But, on the 
whole, this subordinate position of woman, or rather 
this instinctive dominance of the man, is a weakness, at 
least from our modern point of view, in his work. He 
never conceives womanhood quite clearly. The mas- 
culine is too strong in him for that, and its prepon- 
derance is the cause why few of his women have the 
weight, the worth, or the character some other poets 
give them. Wordsworth's picture of his sister, his short 
poem to his wife, his Affliction of Margaret* his High- 

* Compare the passion of motherhood as expressed in this mag- 
nificent poem with that of Psyche in The Princess in the lines be- 
ginning 

Ah me, my babe, my blossom, ah, my child, 
My one sweet child, whom I shall see no more. 

There is no comparison. Indeed, the motherhood in Wordsworth's 
The Complaint and in Her eyes are wild is closer, more intimate to the 
primal passion, than anything in Tennyson, save always the intense 
penetration of Rizpah. 

My baby, the bones that had suck'd me, the hones that had laughed 
and cried — 

Theirs ? O, no ! they are mine — not theirs — they had moved in my 
side. 

That is as great as Nature herself. 



The Poems of 1842 99 

la7id Girl, any of his women, are of more reality than 
the women of Tennyson. It seems, and it is a fault in a 
poet, as if at the bottom of his mind, and in spite of his 
Princess, he tended to the view of woman which his 
angry boy expresses in Locksley Hall : 

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine, 
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine. 

This is, of course, continually modified. He is always 
trying to conceive women as higher than this, and he 
succeeds ; but a blind pull in his mind, growing out of 
his nature, appears to draw him back to this lower con- 
ception. He cannot get his women of equal worth with 
his men. One of the results of this is that there is no 
vital or supreme passion between the sexes expressed by 
Tennyson. There is always a certain element of conde- 
scension in the man, and where there is a shred of con- 
descension there is no supreme passion. The nearest he 
gets to it is in the expression of the longing for lost love, 
and this is expressed by the man rather than by the 
woman.* It is the man who utters in Maud that most 
sorrowful and lovely of all Tennyson's cries : 

* There are always exceptions to be found to general statements 
of this kind, and they are frequently strong exceptions. Elaitze dro-ws 
near to such an exception, and the song in The Princess — "Tears, 
idle tears," is sung by a girl, and she sings it in her own person. 
The lines : 

Dear as remember'd kisses after death. 

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd 

On lips that are for others ; 

are intimate with a passion elsewhere almost unknown in Tennyson, 



lOO Tennyson 

O that 't were possible, 
After long grief and pain, 
To find the arms of my true love 
Round me once again ! 

But of the longing for lost love there are two poems, one 
in this book, and one included in it a little later, which 
record the wild love-sorrow of men. One is a kind 
of ballad, Edward Gray, and the greater part of it at- 
tains power through its simplicity, but Tennyson was 
led away at the end, and the poem passes into weak- 
ness. Fancy and reflection come in when the passion 
is over, and we are left a little disenchanted. I wish 
the last three verses were expunged. The other is 
a poem of much greater force, fully conceived, and 
sounding its way through deeper waters than we often 
try to fathom in Tennyson. Its motive, while uncom- 
mon, is adequate to the emotion expressed. Here it is : 

Come not, when I am dead, 

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, 

To trample round my fallen head, 

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. 

There let the wind sweep and the plover cry ;- 
But thou, go by. 

Child, if it were thine error or thy crime, 

I care no longer, being ail unblest ; 
Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time 

And I desire to rest. 
Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie ; 
Go by, go by. 

Weariness of love after long anger of love, weariness of 
life from weariness of love, and, beneath both, unforget- 



The Poems of 1842 loi 



ful tenderness, were rarely better expressed. But, to 
close these notes on the love poems in this volume, it 
is somewhat strange, but illustrative of what I have said 
about the dominance of the man in Tennyson, that 
the poem of fullest regret for love drowned in death is 
written in memory of a man. Every one knows it ; it is 
a piece of perfect work, fully felt, and fully finished, 
simple and profound — and with what fine art Nature 
is inwoven with its passion ! 

Break, break, break, 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea, 
And I would that my tongue could utter 

The thoughts that arise in me. 

There is no need to quote the rest : it lives in the 
memory of man. 

Along with these poems of love arose poems of mod- 
ern life, half dramatic, half idyllic ; dramatic idylls — 
some of a serious, even stately simplicity, quite close to 
common human life, like Dora, which is a little master- 
piece ; others of a homespun humour mingled with im- 
aginative thought, like Audley Court and The Golden 
Year ; and others full of that honest University humour 
which characterises the talk of Englishmen when they 
are on a vacation tour, like Walkmg to the Mail and 
Edwin Morris. These are pure modernisms ; they also 
are new in English poetry ; they have opened a vein 
which many others may work at, and they have opened 
it in an excellent and varied way. The very similes 
Tennyson uses in them are in harmony with the charac- 



I02 Tennyson 



ter of the poems, similes drawn from every-day sounds 
and sights, and so vital with observation of common 
English life and things that they seem to illuminate the 
page with England. 



A body slight and round, and like a pear 
In growing, modest eyes, a hand, a foot 
Lessening in perfect cadence, and a skin 
As clean and white as privet when it flowers. 



James — you know him — old, but full 
Of force and choler, and firm upon his feet, 
And like an oaken stock in winter woods, 
O'erflourish'd by the hoary clematis. 



He laugh'd, and I, though sleepy, like a horse 
That hears the corn-bin open, prick'd my ears. 



Scattered through these poems, and in accordance 
with all I have said of Tennyson's incorporation of 
Nature and the heart of man, are lovely, true, and inti- 
mate descriptions of Nature in England, done with an 
art which never forgot itself, and which seemed some- 
times too elaborate in skill. Indeed, we should often 
feel this, were it not that the full product gives so com- 
plete a pleasure. 

The Gardener s Daughter is alive with such descrip- 
tions ; and it would be worth while to read that of the 
entrance into the garden. Step by step, as we move on, 
the changing scene is painted. We walk through the 
landscape with Tennyson. This garden-passage begins : 



The Poems of 1842 10; 



We reach'd a meadow slanting to the north. 
When the last line strikes the ear, 

The twinkling laurel scatter'd silver lights, 

it is meant to paint the very thing by words ; but a far 
finer instance of this, where the line is so arranged in 
sound as to be itself what he describes, is towards the 
end of the poem : 

Or as once we met 
Unheedful tho', beneath a whispering rain 
Night slid down one long stream of sighing wind. 
And in her bosom bore the baby, Sleep. 

Nor can I pass by that description of the Lincoln 
meadows, near the town, lush in thick grass and in 
broad waters, and deep in wind-washed trees — 

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. 
News from the humming city comes to it 
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
The windy clanging of the minster clock ; 
Although between it and the garden lies 
A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream. 
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar, 
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on. 
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge 
Crown'd with the minster-towers. 

The fields between 
Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-udder'd kine. 
And all about the large lime feathers low, 
The lime a summer home of murmurous wings. 



I04 Tennyson 



The close of Audley Court is as near to truth : 

The town was hush'd beneath us : lower down 
The bay was oily-calm ; the harbour buoy, 
With one green sparkle ever and anon 
Dipt by itself, and we were glad at heart. 

That is evening, when the moon is high : here is morning 
lifting herself in exultation : 

Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown 
Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl,* 
Far furrowing into light the mounded rack, 
Beyond the fair green field and eastern lea. 

This has that classic note of Milton, but it is quite 
original. There are many touches of Nature as fine as 
this in Locksley Hall, but that poem has far more to do 
with man than with Nature. It is, however, set in land- 
scape which reflects the temper of the hero — sandy 
tracks on which the ocean thunders and the curlews 
cry — the sea-shore on one side, and the moorland on 
the other ; and at the last, the vapour blackening from 
the moor with the blast in its breast to fall on Locksley 
Hall. 

Every one knows this poem. Its form is good, its 
divisions clear. It passes from one division to another 
with ease and imagination. Every one knows the hero, 
with his hour of happy love, his rage of disillusion, his 

* Compare the lines in The Pf-incess : 

Morn in the white wake of the morning star 
Came furrowing all the orient into gold. 



The Poems of 1842 105 

hope at the end that the living present may excite him 
by its science, and give him back his youthful inspira- 
tion. I never thought that this blustering youth, " weak 
as is a breaking wave," whom Tennyson invented so 
well, and who is so true to a common type — a type he 
lowers much further in the hero of Maud — would find 
any inspiration in science or the march of commerce ; 
and the second Locksley Hall^ where Tennyson draws 
the same personage after he had settled on his lees, 
proves that he got no good out of science or the British 
carrying trade. But how modern it all is ; how kindled 
Tennyson is by the time in which he was living, how 
alive to its wants, its strife, its faults, its good ! We are 
miles and miles away from the temper in which Keats 
or Shelley regarded their world. 

Three other poems in this volume may be called theo- 
logical, and grouped together : St. Simeon Stylites^ The 
Two Voices^ and The Vision of Sin. The first is a study 
of the type of the ascetic in its extreme. Neverthe- 
less, so ably, so robustly, and yet so delicately is it 
done that its spirit and its qualities belong to the whole 
range of ascetics, from Stylites down to the slightest 
subduer of the flesh. The conviction that all evil lies in 
matter and all good in its subjugation ; that the more 
the flesh is punished, the more certain is salvation, and 
the greater the power of the punisher over matter, so 
that miracles are wrought ; the claim, the right estab- 
lished over God, from whom self-inflicted penance 
wrenches privilege ; the incessant assertion of sin in 



io6 Tennyson 



apparent or real humility lest God should catch him 
tripping ; the steady underlying vanity and boastfulness ; 
his contempt of the flesh-ridden people ; his isolation — 
all these and far more are given in this admirable study, 
filled with thought and insight. Rarely has Tennyson 
thrown himself more completely out of himself. More- 
over, and this is perhaps the best and most poetic thing 
in the piece, he does not make us dislike or despise the 
Saint. We touch the human soul of one whom we can 
pity, and even admire. Nearly forty years of that mad 
existence had not unmanned the ascetic altogether. 
To convey that impression was an excellent trait of art. 

I cannot find a like pleasure in The Two Voices. As 
much as Tennyson has gone outside himself in Si7neon 
Stylites^ so much has he gone into himself in The Two 
Voices. A man may do that and be still poetic, and the 
poem proves this. It is full of a poet's power, espe- 
cially in the illustrations taken from Nature, like that 
of the dragon-fly and the mountain-angle jutting clear 
from the mist ; but the self-involution of the poem 
places it on a lower level than poetry which loses self- 
thought in the creation of a being beyond the self of the 
poet. Moreover, the argumentative form lowers still 
more the power of making excellent poetry. The best 
part is where the disputing voices have ceased to 
talk, where the poet throws open the window, and sees 
every one going to church in the summer morning. 

The Vision of Sin is, on the contrary, one of the very 
good things in this book. It is allegorical, but not too 



The Poems of 1842 107 

allegorical. The youth who rides to the palace and who 
rides away into the waste, a ruined cynic, dominates the 
allegory by his personality ; and our interest in him and 
his fate is greater than that we feel in the meaning of 
the poem. Nevertheless, both the thoughts and the alle- 
gory are of a quality as original as they are just. Ten- 
nyson has never done better thinking. The youth who 
rides the horse of the soul, winged with aspiration and 
imagination, weighs the horse down, for he has already 
been mastered by the flesh. He is led into the palace 
of sensual pleasure, not coarse but refined pleasure, 
slipping incessantly, however, into coarser forms. The 
main contention of the allegory is that subtilised sensu- 
ality is finally driven, in order to capture fresh pleasure, 
into wilder, fiercer, and baser forms, till all pleasure 
dies. Then the mist of satiety, 

A vapour heavy, hueless, formless, cold, 

creeps slowly on from where Eternal Law, sitting be- 
yond the darkness and the cataract and annexing the 
punishment of exhaustion to unbroken indulgence, 
makes himself an awful rose of dawn. 

The end of the youth is shamelessness and malice, 
disbelief in love and goodness, scorn of self and scorn 
of man, sour cynicism — and the picture of this state 
of mind is admirably drawn in the jumping verses that 
follow. But Tennyson does not leave him to utter 
loss. The mystic mountain range arises again. In 
the gulf below, the sensual Avho in their youth were 



io8 Tennyson 



half divine are devoured by worms, and quicken into 
lower forms ; but three Spirits apart, three Spirits of 
judgment, speak of the youth who has ruined his life. 
The world beyond takes interest in him. 
The first says : 

Behold ! it was a crime 
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time. 

The truth could not be more briefly or better put. 
Every lust of sense is driven, in order to re-take the 
original pleasure, to increase the stimulant, to make it 
fiercer and more brutal. At last no stimulation awakens 
the sense, for the stimulation has paralysed it. This is 
sense avenged by sense. But the man is forced to go 
on with the sensual effort, as a drunkard is forced to go 
on drinking, while at the same time no pleasure attends 
the effort. The sense has worn with time. Justice is 
done. 

But the loss of all pleasure has made him hate happi- 
ness, call it vile, and scorn both God and man. So 
another Spirit cries : 

The crime of sense became 
The crime of malice, and is equal blame. 

Nevertheless, the man is not wholly lost. Were he 
absolutely evil, he would have had no feeling, no scorn, 
no mockery ; he could not even see the love and good- 
ness at which he grins. So another Spirit answers : 

He had not wholly quenched his power. 
A little grain of conscience made him sour. 



The Poems of 1842 109 

Then a voice cries, Is there any hope ? and the close of 
the poem is majestic. 

To which an answer peal'd from that high land, 
But in a tongue no man could understand ; 
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn 
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. 

Moreover, this poem, with the Ulysses^ marks with 
great clearness what an advance Tennyson had made 
in his art since 1833. It was plain now that he 
deserved his audience, and that he was determined to 
be more and more master of his art. He had laboured 
at perfecting its powers. Metre is no more a difficulty. 
The rush of the lines of Locksley Hall is like the incom- 
ing of billows on the beach. The thing to be said is 
always given a poetic turn ; there is not a line of prose 
in the whole book. The subjects are worthy, are human, 
are at our doors. They are still evolved out of his own 
consciousness, out of his own life and feeling ; but they 
are moving on to the time when the subjects will come 
from without, when the thought and feeling of universal 
man will press on him, and demand that he should 
express it. Not only the present, but the future is 
beginning to interest him. 

For he sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC POEMS OF 1 842 
WITH THE LATER CLASSICAL POEMS 

THE classical poems in the volume of 1833 were two, 
(Enone and The Lotos-Eaters. I have kept them 
for separate treatment, because in 1842, when they 
reappeared, they were so largely recast, and their land- 
scape so changed, that it would have been unfair to 
Tennyson to consider them save in the finished form he 
gave them in 1842. In that year also he added another 
classical poem to these, the Ulysses. These are the 
three, and the first thing to think of is their landscape, 
which is distinct and invented. 

I have said that Tennyson, when he worked on natural 
scenery outside of his own land, was not a good land- 
scapist. Not only had he little sympathy with southern 
Nature, but he also required to assimilate during long 
years of companionship the scenery he described, before 
he could, with his full power, embody it in verse. But 
the impressions he received in travel were brief. They 
did not soak into him, and he could not reproduce them 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 11 1 

well. This, I said, was the case when he painted direct 
from Nature. 

But it is not the case when he invented, when he 
painted from the vision he had of a landscape in his own 
soul. He saw it, rising like an exhalation into form 
around his figures. He took the cloud-shapes, and com- 
posed them slowly ; rejecting this, accepting that, till he 
had got the background which he needed for (Enone, 
or Ulysses, or the mild-eyed Lotos-eaters. Then his 
Nature-painting, wherever the scene is placed, is fine in 
itself, and necessarily fits the subject. Of course, he 
does not stand alone in such invention. Every poet, as 
every painter, practises, more or less, this part of his art. 
Wordsworth and Walter Scott are almost solitary in 
their habit, rarely infringed, of painting all their land- 
scape on the spot, direct from Nature. But then, they 
did not take subjects outside of their own country and 
their own time, or if they did, as when Wordsworth 
took a classical subject like Laodamia^ they did not put 
in a landscape. 

But the greater number of the poets invent ; and 
there is no more fascinating subject in literature, or one 
as yet more untouched, than this invented landscape of 
the poets. In what way each of them did it ; their 
favourite tricks in doing it ; the different way each of 
them uses Nature for his purpose or his figures ; the 
limits of invented landscape ; its analogies to landscape 
painting — these are all branches of the subject, and 
when we have little to do and want amusement, we 



112 Tennyson 

could not find happier entertainment than the study of 
this kind of Nature-painting in Shelley or Keats or 
Spenser ; or, when we have done such a study of two or 
three poets' work, than a comparison of their separate 
methods of invention. 

Such invented landscape is sometimes done from a 
previous study from Nature which is worked up after- 
wards into a picture, and of this the landscape in the 
CEnone of 1833 is an instance. At other times, it is a 
picture composed out of various impressions of diverse 
places brought together into one landscape, and this is 
the case with a number of the landscapes in The Revolt 
of Islam^ and in the Prometheus Unbound. It is some- 
times used to illustrate the human passions treated of in 
the poem, the landscape echoing as it were the feelings 
of the persons, even the progress of their thoughts. 
Spenser does this echoing landscape with great direct- 
ness, as in the description of the bower of Acrasia, or of 
the Cave of Mammon, or of the haunt of Despair. 
Tennyson does it with great deliberation in The Lotos- 
Eaters. Shelley, in the latter part of Alastor^ makes the 
whole scene — and especially the course of the river 
down the glen, the narrowing of the glen, and the sud- 
den opening out of its jaws on a vast landscape lying far 
below in the dying sunlight — image, step by step, the 
thoughts of his poet wandering to his death. Sometimes 
this invented landscape is simply a background, without 
any purpose in it, only that the tones are kept in har- 
mony with the human action ; and sometimes it is done 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 113 



for pure pleasure in composing Nature, but in that case, 
when there are human beings in the foreground of the 
poem, there is a great danger lest Nature overwhelm 
humanity in the poem, or lest the poem lack unity ; and 
both these pitfalls, for example, are fallen into by Keats 
in Endymion. 

In classical poems, the landscape must of course be 
invented, unless, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 
the poet should go to Troy or Ithaca, and describe 
things as they are now, in order to gain local colour. 
Since the days of Pre-Raphaelitism, some poets have 
used this way, but for the most part they invent ; and 
Tennyson saw his Lotos Island and the Mount of Ida 
only " with the intellectual eye." In (Enone, however, 
he began with direct description, with his eye upon the 
scene. It was a valley in the Pyrenees, we are told, 
which he chose as background for his betrayed maiden, 
for Paris and the goddesses, when he wrote of them in 
1833 ; and here is this first landscape : 

There is a dale in Ida, lovelier 
Than any in old Ionia, beautiful 
With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean 
Above the loud glenriver, v/hich hath worn 
A path thro' steepdown granite walls below 
Mantled with flowering tendriltwine. In front 
The cedar-shadowy valleys open wide. 
Far seen, high over all the Godbuilt wall 
And many a snowycolumned range divine, 
Mounted with awful sculptures — men and Gods, 
The work of Gods— bright on the dark blue sky 
The windy citadel of Ilion 
Shone, like the crown of Troas. 



114 Tennyson 



As Tennyson thought of this, he saw how poor it was in 
comparison with what he might do if he chose. The 
blank verse halts ; a hurly-burly of vowels like " Than 
any in old Ionia " is a sorrowful thing ; there is no care- 
ful composition of the picture ; the things described 
have not that vital connection one with the other which 
should enable the imaginative eye to follow them step by 
step down the valley till it opens on the plain where 
Troy stands white, below its citadel. 

Now observe what an artist who has trained his powers 
can make of his first rough sketch, when, neglecting what 
he has seen, he invents and composes with imaginative 
care. Here is the picture of 1842 made out of the 
sketch of 1833 : 

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier 

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. 

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, 

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, 

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand 

The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down 

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars 

The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine 

In cataract after cataract to the sea. 

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus 

Stands up and takes the morning : but in front 

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal 

Troas and Ilion's coluran'd citadel, 

The crown of Troas. 

The verse is now weighty and poised and nobly 
paused — yet it moves swiftly enough. The landscape 
now is absolutely clear, and it is partly done by cautious 
additions to the original sketch. Moreover, being seen 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 i 15 

by the imagination in an hour of joy, it is far truer in 
its details to Nature than the previous sketch. In any 
invented landscape, though the whole has not been seen 
in Nature, the parts must be true to her ways ; and noth- 
ing can image better the actual thing than that phrase 
concerning a lonely peak at dawn, that it " takes the 
morning" ; nor the lifting and slow absorption of the 
mists of night when the sun slants warm into the pines 
of the glen, than those slow-wrought, concentrated lines 
about the mountain vapour. 

That is one illustration of my point, and in this in- 
stance the original has been expanded. I will now com- 
pare another piece of the (Enone of 1833 with its new 
form in 1842. Here there is no expansion, there is con- 
traction. The original was too diffuse : it is now con- 
cised with admirable force. This is the original 
description of the coming of the goddesses : 

It was the deep midnoon ; one silvery cloud 

Had lost his way among the piney hills. 

They came — all three — the Olympian goddesses : 

Naked they came to the smoothswarded bower, 

Lustrous with lily flower, violeteyed 

Both white and blue, with lotetree-fruit thickset, 

Shadowed with singing pine ; and all the while, 

Above, the overwandering ivy and vine 

This way and that in many a wild festoon 

Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs 

With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'. 

And this is the new thing, with its one line — 

'* And at their feet the crocus brake like fire " — 



ii6 Tennyson 



I 



which is the centre light and passion of the whole, 
which fills the scene, not only with golden glory, but 
with the immortal power of the gods, before whose deity 
Nature blossoms into worship : 

It was the deep mid-noon : one silvery cloud 

Had lost his way between the piney sides 

Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came, 

Naked they came to the smooth-swarded bower, 

And at their feet the crocus brake like fire, 

Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, 

Lotus and lilies : and a wind arose, 

And overhead the wandering ivy and vine, 

This way and that, in many a wild festoon 

Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs 

With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'. 

Nothing can be more careful than the composition of 
this background for the goddesses. Some have said 
that it is a little too pictorial for poetry ; but we will be 
thankful that we have a piece of work of a kind which 
was then new in poetry, and that it is splendidly done.* 

But there is something more to say. In the original 
cast, the scenery of the poem was not fully inwoven with 

* See how Tennyson has left out the thoroughly bad line — " They 
came — all three — the Olympian goddesses " — how he has made melo- 
dious the halting lines, such as " Both white and blue, with lotetree- 
fruit thickset " ; and how the confusion of colour and flowers, the 
over-description of the flowers, and the addition of the pine-groves 
above the bower, all of which take our eyes away from the god- 
desses, are omitted or reduced to simplicity. Moreover he knew 
clearly the good things in his original verses and did not touch those 
admirable four last lines. He may have had in his ear Milton's 
"with the gadding vine o'ergrown," but if so — how delightfully he 
has fulfilled that which Milton only touched with a single adjective. 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 117 

CEnone's mind. It did not fit her or feel with her as 
subtly and intimately as he wished ; she did not seem to 
have lived with it in long association — a thing Tennyson 
felt was necessary for himself if he were to describe a 
landscape perfectly. Nor were the mountains or the 
woods or the gorge in the first draft deep enough or 
high enough for her passion or for the fateful meeting 
of the goddesses, or sombre enough for her misery or 
for the fate of Troy, which lies beyond the poem and 
yet is contained within its action. 

To fulfil and embody in the landscape these various 
hues of passion, to make the landscape more absolutely 
one with them, Tennyson set himself to work in the new 
poem, and he did it by adding a touch here and a touch 
there, by describing the landscape — a trick of his which 
he first used in Mariana — at different times of the day 
with a greater fulness than before, until at last we can 
no more divide CEnone from the Nature in which she is 
placed than we can separate the soul from the body of a 
friend. She is involved in the Nature which surrounds 
her, and the Nature in which she lives has mixed itself 
with her thought and her passion. Her constant cry, 
even in the first draft, proves this : 

O mother Ida, harken ere I die ! 

This power of forging together Nature and the heart 
of man adds emotion to the skill with which the occa- 
sional figures are placed in the landscape, and to the 
vividness with which they are suddenly, almost flamingly, 



Tennyson 



struck upon the sight. I need not quote the splendid 
image of Aphrodite in this poem, but here is Paris issu- 
ing from the wood : 

Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, 

Leading a jet-black goat white-horned, white-hooved, 

Came up from reedy Simois all alone. 

White-breasted like a star 
Fronting the dawn he moved ; a leopard skin 
Droop'd from his shoulder, but his sunny hair 
Cluster'd about his temples like a god's ; 
And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens 
When the wind blows the foam. 

From end to end the Idylls of the King is full of figure- 
painting, as illuminated and illuminating the scene, as 
that of Paris here on Ida. Another example, from The 
Lady of Shalott^ where Sir Lancelot comes riding down 
by the river side, is too well known to quote. These are 
the first five lines of it : 

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, 
He rode between the barley-sheaves ; 
The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves 
And flamed upon the brazen greaves 
Of bold Sir Lancelot. 

The rest of it is equally brilliant. Horse and man, 
sunlight and scenery, gleaming river and glancing ar- 
mour — how they fit together, into what unity of impres- 
sion they are knit ! The verse flashes and scintillates 
like the armour, like the eyes of Lancelot in the sun- 
light. The passage is perhaps almost over-sparkled, and 
it might be chastened a little, shortened by at least one 
verse, and improved ; but it is a wonderful piece of gold 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 1 19 

and jewel-work, and only Milton can excel it in its own 
sphere. We might compare it with the description of 
Raphael and his dress in Paradise Lost. Of course the 
Miltonic work is the more dignified, for the figure is that 
of the Angel of the Earth. Milton's verse too is stately 
— blank verse, not the jingling trot of the light metre 
Tennyson chose for his lightly imagined subject — but 
the colour, the clearness, the presentation of the dress 
and the figure, the many-hued sculpture, and the glori- 
ous gleaming of Milton's Archangel, make clear to us on 
what master Tennyson, even in these pictorial matters, 
now modelled his technical work. 

Such, to return from this excursion on figure-drawing, 
is the invented landscape in (Enone. But fine landscape 
and fine figure-drawing are not enough to make a fine 
poem. Human interest, human passion, must be greater 
than Nature, and dominate the subject. Indeed, all this 
lovely scenery is nothing in comparison with the sorrow 
and love of CEnone, recalling her lost love in the places 
where once she lived in joy. This is the main humanity 
of the poem. But there is more. Her common sorrow 
is lifted almost into the proportions of Greek tragedy by 
its cause and by its results. It is caused by a quarrel in 
Olympus, and the mountain nymph is sacrificed without 
a thought to the vanity of the careless gods. That is an 
ever-recurring tragedy in human history. Moreover, the 
personal tragedy deepens when we see the fateful dread 
in CEnone's heart that she will far away in time hold her 
lover's life in her hands, and refuse to give it back to 



I20 Tennyson 

him — a fatality that Tennyson treated before he died. 
And secondly, CEnone's sorrow is lifted into dignity by 
the vast results which flowed from its cause. Behind it 
were the mighty fates of Troy, the ten years' battle, the 
anger of Achilles, the wanderings of Ulysses, the tragedy 
of Agamemnon, the founding of Rome, and the three 
great epics of the ancient world. 

This was then a subject well chosen, holding in it 
mighty human thoughts and destinies, and these are liv- 
ing in the poem. But there is something more to say. 
Tennyson, in the way I have already explained, makes 
all these classic poems fit in with modern times and in- 
struct the conscience or enhance the aspiration of those 
who read his work. Wordsworth did this in his Lao- 
datnia and Dion. Keats did not do it, Greek as were his 
subjects. He loved their beauty, not their lessons to 
mankind. Tennyson does give what Wordsworth does 
not — their sensuous beauty — but he also gives their uni- 
versal lesson. And in CEnone he lays down that which 
in all his poetry and in his character also was one of the 
first of thoughts to him, not only the foundation of life, 
and government, of true power, and, in the end, of 
beauty, but also the root of the glory and strength of 
England as he wished her to be. This is held in the 
speech of Pallas, and is the centre of the poem : 

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, 
These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 
Yet not for power (power of herself 
Would come uncall'd for) but to live by law. 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 121 

Acting the law we live by without fear ; 
And, because right is right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. 

I woo thee not with gifts. 
Sequel of guerdon could not alter me 
To fairer. Judge thou me by what I am. 
So shalt thou find me fairest. 

Oh, rest thee sure 
That I shall love thee well and cleave to thee, 
So that my vigour, wedded to thy blood, 
Shall strike within thy pulses, like a god's, 
To push thee forward thro' a life of shocks, 
Dangers, and deeds, until endurance grow 
Sinew'd with action, and the full-grown will, 
Circled thro' all experiences, pure law, 
Commeasure perfect freedom. 

In these thoughts we pierce down to one of the roots 
of Tennyson. On those thoughts he built his patriotic 
poetry. In order to enhance those thoughts, he built as 
their contrast and opposite the character of the hero in 
the two Locksky Halls. On those lines he draws the 
character of King Arthur. On those lines, in a hundred 
poems, he lays down what he considers to be the great- 
ness of 'England, the greatness of mankind. Athena in 
the heart, to use Ruskin's phrase, is a universal need ; 
and the expression of this thought of Tennyson's makes 
CEnone not only a classic but a modern poem. 

In The Lotos-Eaters the landscape is also invented. 
There is no description in the Odyssey of the land of 
" the Lotos-eaters, who eat a flowery food." It is only 
said that " whoso ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos 
had no desire to bring tidings to the ship, or to come 



122 Tennyson 



back to it, but chose to dwell among the lotos-eating 
folk, and, forgetful of returning, fed upon the lotos." 
This is the source of Tennyson's poem. But in a 
Nature-loving world like ours and midst of that modern 
poetic temper which makes Nature reflect humanity, so 
simple a treatment is not enough for Tennyson. He 
drives the bark of Ulysses into a shallow bay opening up 
shoreward into a deep valley bordered with cliffs, down 
whose sides thin streams of silken mist are falHng, and 
at the head of the valley three snow-crowned mountain- 
peaks are rosy in the sunset. The vale is filled with the 
soft murmur of a river which glides at last through the 
yellow sand of the seashore into the sea over which the 
sun is setting. This is his landscape, and everywhere 
below the p.ines, in every creek and alley, on every lawn, 
beside every stream, the lotos blooms and sheds its 
yellow dust upon the weary wind. 

But the landscape itself is not enough. It must 
be put into harmony with the soft oblivion which the 
lotos brings, with the rest and slumber of life dreaming 
that it dreams. So the air is languid, and the moon has 
completed its waxing and is full-faced ; and the streams 
fall in slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, and their 
sheets of foam are slumbrous, and the snow on the 
rosy peaks is very old, and the amber light dreams, and 
the waves curve tenderly upon the land, and the leaf 
and the apple on the trees round to fulness and fall, full 
ripe, and all the winds and sounds are low. Nature, 
like the indwellers of the land, has eaten of the indolent 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 123 

forgetfulness of the flower. This is the poet's way, and 

he had his examples of this kind of work in Spenser's 

Cave of Sleep and in Thomson's Castle of Indolence ; but 

I think he has excelled them both. 

As to the main thought of the poem, it is, like that 

of these classical poems in general, of great simplicity, 

and its feeling felt at all times of human life. *' Why 

should we only toil, the roof and crown of things ? 

Death is the end of life, why then should life be 

labour ? 

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 
To war with evil ? Is there any peace 
In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

Enough of action, of trouble on trouble, pain on pain. 
No more of pursuit, of mending what is broken, of the 
strife of love. To dream, to sleep : 

Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more." 

The first sketch of this thought was in the Sea-Fairies 
of 1830, and a lightly treated thing it was. Then that 
was made into The Lotos- Eaters of 1833, the first part 
of which is kept in the recast of the poem of 1842. But 
in the latter part, a great and vital change was made. 
First, the passage, 

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, etc., 

was added, and it is a passage which doubles the human 
interest of the poem ; and, secondly, instead of the 
jingling, unintellectual, merely fanciful ending of the 



1 24 Tennyson 



poem of 1833, every image of which wanders hither 
and thither without clear purpose and weakens the 
impression of the previous part, the poem thus closing 
in a feeble anti-climax, we have the weighty, solemn, 
thoughtful, classic close, embodying the Epicurean con- 
ception of the gods, bringing all Olympus down into 
harmony with the indifferent dreaming of the Lotos- 
eaters, but leaving in our minds the sense of a 
dreadful woe tending on those that dream ; for what the 
gods do with impunity, man may not do. Yet, even the 
Lotos-eating Gods inevitable fate awaits. 

This is the work of a great artist, and in this steady 
improvement of his poems Tennyson stands almost 
alone. Other poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, did not 
recast their poems in this wholesale fashion, and the 
additions or changes which they made were by no 
means always improvements. Tennyson, working with 
his clear sense of what was artistic, and with the stately 
steadiness which belonged to his character, not only im- 
proved but doubled the value of the poems he altered.* 
Many persons would like another kind of artist — one who 
does at a rush what he desires to do, or one who could 



* It would be an excellent thing if Lord Tennyson would permit 
Messrs. Macmillan to reprint the volumes of 1830 and 1833. In 
most cases it is a mistake to issue the earliest forms of a great poet's 
works — forms which he has rejected as inadequate. But in this case 
it would not be a mistake. It would be a lesson to all artists, and 
still more to all critics, to study the noble changes Tennyson here 
made ; and it would not diminish, but greatly enhance, our admira- 
tion of his art and character. 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 125 

not go back on what he had done, because new things 
occur to him incessantly ; and this our liking is a matter 
of temperament. But Tennyson was built in another 
fashion. What he did was wholly in harmony with the 
man, and our business is not to wish the artist different, 
but to find out what he is, and to love him within the 
necessary limits of his sphere. In that way we get his 
good, and are not troubled by his weaknesses. 

The last of the classical poems in the volume of 1842 
is, from contemplation's point of view, the best. This 
is the Ulysses. The scene is set on the shore of Ithaca, 
at the port. The time is evening. The moon is rising 
and the sea is gloomed by the shadows of the coming 
night. There is no description of the landscape, but 
enough is given to make us feel the time and place. 
Yet when Tennyson touches Nature in this poem it is 
done with even more mastery than in (Enone ; with ex- 
traordinary brevity and force. A whole world of ocean 
weather and of sea experience is in the last two lines of 
this : 

All times I have enjoy'd 
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 
That loved me, and alone : on shore, and when 
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
Vext the dim sea : 

And I quote the three lines which follow, not only 
because the Nature in them strikes the note of that pro- 
found melancholy which lay underneath the intense and 
hopeless curiosity of the Renaissance — the same kind of 



1 26 Tennyson 

curiosity which Ulysses feels in this poem — but also 
because the second line is one of Tennyson's finest 
examples of sound echoing the sense : 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks : 

The long day wanes : the slow moon climbs ; the deep 

Moans round with many voices. 

But the dominant interest here, more than in CEnone 
and The Lotos-Eaters, is the human interest — the soul 
that cannot rest, whom the unknown always allures to 
action — the image of the exact opposite of the temper 
of mind of the Lotos-eaters. 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 

For ever and for ever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use ! 

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life 

Were all too little, — and of one to me 

Little remains : but every hour is saved 

From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things ; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself. 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

There never was a better description of the temper 
of the higher spirits of the Renaissance in Italy. We 
listen to the very soul of Leonardo da Vinci. 

This too is Tennyson. I have heard it said that, in 
this poem, he drew the portrait of his own mind. I can 
well believe it, and it is a noble temper with which to 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 127 

step into the fuller manhood of middle life. Indeed, he 
never thought it too late to seek in his own art a newer 
world. Even at eighty years he took new subjects and 
tried new ways in poetry. The cry of his Ulysses was 
the cry of his old age : 

Tho' much is taken, much abides : and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are : 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

Thus he returned to the Greek, as Keats had done ; 
but not as Keats, only for the sake of the beauty of 
Greece, but also for the sake of the ethic power of her 
stories ; not like Keats, that he might find in ancient 
times a refuge from the baseness of the present, but 
that he might bring thoughts out of the past to rejoice 
and illuminate the present. The speech of Pallas to 
Paris is spoken to England : the song of the Lotos- 
eater is a warning to the drifters and dreamers of our 
world ; in the thoughts of Ulysses is held the power and 
the glory of England. Nevertheless, though these poems 
have an ethical direction, it is subordinate t6 their first 
direction, which is to represent the beauty in their sub- 
jects. No one who has any sense of art will presume to 
accuse them of being didactic rather than artistic. 

It was, however, not only in Greek story that in these 
years he sought his subjects. He turned to that great 
romantic cycle which has for eight centuries at least 



128 Tennyson 



kindled the imagination of England and been the dar- 
ling of her poets. He turned to the tale of Arthur and 
his knights. 

It may be that his study of Milton, which now appears 
so clearly in his blank verse, had made him think, quite 
early in life, of an Arthurian epic, which, if Milton 
swerved from, he might himself fulfil ; but it is proba- 
ble that this interest was at first only a slight and glan- 
cing interest, such as every poetic person takes in the tale 
with all its Celtic allurement. The small fragment of 
Launcelot and Guinevere is only a charming piece of glit- 
tering grace. The Lady of Shalott is] a pleasant piece 
of play with his readers — simplicity in a mask of mysti- 
cism. Sir Galahad is graver, but still only an occasional 
piece, such as a poet makes " to try his hand." 

Of these The Lady of Shalott is the best, as it is in- 
tended to be. No poem is more brilliant in words, but 
it does not attempt so much as Sir Galahad to make the 
sound of the verse describe the thing. It has no lines 
so imitative as 

The shattering trumpet shrilleth high, 

but it has that amazing piece of diamond description 
which I have already quoted. As to its meaning, folk 
have exhausted themselves to find it, and fruitlessly. It 
was never intended to have any special meaning. Ten- 
nyson was playing with his own imagination when he 
wrote it. He saw the island and the girl in the tower, and 
then the loom and web and mirror crept into the tower ; 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 129 

and then he saw the pictures in the mirror, and was 
pleased to describe them ; and then he thought of the 
curse, and then of Lancelot, and then of death. The 
poem grew without intention like a flower which had not 
been on earth before. Yet out of all the fancy arose one 
touch of reality. What a secluded maid sees are but 
pictures, but the hour comes when she says, " I am half 
sick of shadows." To know that the pictures of the 
mind are shadows is to be wild to seek reality. Then if 
love come, hopeless love, all the world of mere phan- 
tasy breaks up, and the actual kills : 

Out flew the web and floated wide ; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side ; 
" The curse come upon me," cried 
The Lady of Shalott. 

If there be meaning at all in this piece of gossamer 
fancy, that is it, and, like all Tennyson's meanings, it is 
as simple as the day. 

As to the Sir Galahad, the true romantic note which, 
in the creation of Galahad, is made to thrill more high 
and clear by the addition of the keener note of vir- 
ginity, fills that poem. The conception of the total 
conquest of the evil of matter, of the total indifference 
to all appetite and sense, so that life on earth was 
lived in a supersensuous realm wherein all things and 
beings thought to be invisible were visible — was a con- 
ception of pure art, I might even say of pure romance. 
In that conception religious passion was added to ro- 
mance, and asceticism clothed with spiritual beauty. 



130 Tennyson 



Art, therefore, found in it one of its natural subjects. 
Tennyson, even more than in the Galahad of the Idylls 
of the King^ seized in this poem the beauty of celestial 
purity, and of the supernatural world it opened to his 
virgin knight. No one can speak too highly of verses 
like that beginning : 

When down the stormy crescent goes, 

or the two that follow it. It is not only Galahad who 
is represented in them as above Nature, but it is that 
Nature herself, while she is seen and heard, is spirit- 
ualised. In their high-ringing clang we feel the world 
which is the substance of the shadow-world we see. 

When we come to the Morte d' Arthur^ we come to 
that which is more serious than these tentative flights 
over a great subject. We come to the love of a lifetime. 
The poem itself belongs to the Idylls of the Khig^ and I 
shall speak of it in its place. But the prologue and 
epilogue belong to the history of 1842, and to the whole 
subject of this chapter. The prologue, with its types 
of modern social life, the parson, the poet, and the man 
of the day — each giving and taking as in a dinner- 
conversation — each in their way maintaining that poetry 
must sit close to the life of the present — shows how vivid 
modern society was now to Tennyson. " A truth looks 
freshest in the fashion of the day." The phrase em- 
bodies his method in these poems. Nor must we miss 
his description of himself. No one who has ever heard 
him read his own poetry can mistake the portrait : 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 131 

. . . . And the poet, little urged, 
But with some prelude of disparagement, 
Read, mouthing out his hollow oes and aes, 
Deep-chested music. 

It could not be more truly done. 

As to the epilogue, it illustrates all I have been saying 
about Tennyson's method with subjects drawn from 
Greek or romantic times. He filled and sustained those 
subjects with thoughts which were as modern as they 
were ancient. While he placed his readers in Camelot, 
Ithaca, or Ida, he made them feel also that they were 
standing in London, Oxford, or an English woodland. 
When the Morte d' Arthur is finished, the hearer of it 
sits rapt. There were " modern touches here and there," 
he says, and when he sleeps, he dreams of 

King Arthur, like a modern gentleman 
Of stateliest port ; and all the people cried, 
" Arthur is come again ; he cannot die." 
Then those that stood upon the hills behind 
Repeated — " Come again, and thrice as fair" ; 
And, further inland, voices echoed — " Come 
With all good things, and war shall be no more." 

The old tale, thus modernised in an epilogue, does not 
lose its dignity ; for now the recoming of Arthur is the 
recoming of Christ in a wider and fairer Christianity. 
We feel here how the new movement of religion and 
theology had sent its full and exciting wave into Tenny- 
son. Arthur's death in the battle and the mist is the 
death of a form of Christianity which, exhausted, died 
in doubt and darkness. His advent as a modern gentle- 



132 Tennyson 



man is the coming of a brighter and more loving Christ 

into the hearts of men. For so ends the epilogue. 

When the voices cry, " Come again, with all good 

things," 

At this a hundred bells began to peal, 

That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed 

The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn. 

This inoculation of ancient stories with modern 
thought, while the tales themselves were kept either 
classic or romantic, received its fullest development in 
the Idylls of the King. But it was less and less used in 
the classic poems written after 1842. They still retained 
the use of one simple thought around which each poem 
gathered itself, but this thought ceased to be so plainly 
modernised as before. Tennyson did not bring Tithonus 
or Lucretius or Tiresias into England. He went to 
them and he stayed with their personality and in their 
time. This change shows, I think, that as his years 
went by he felt that, having done so much for modern 
life, he was licensed to live in these poems, if he liked, 
wholly among the ancients. It seems fitting to treat of 
them in this chapter, even though I transgress the chro- 
nological order in which I generally speak of his poetry. 

So many writers have written on the knowledge of 
classic thought displayed in these poems and on their 
nearness to classic feeling, that I need not dwell upon 
these matters. It has been a favourite subject of re- 
views. Many also have drawn attention to Tennyson's 
frequent use of phrases from the classic writers, and 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 133 

sometimes in such a way as to suggest that he was a 
plagiarist. This is an absurd suggestion. He had a per- 
fect right to transfer to his poems expressions and even 
lines from the classic poets, provided he gave them a 
new setting, or a novel phrasing, in his translation. All 
the great poets have done this when their subject was 
classical, or their poem heroic. Virgil did it, Dante did 
it ; so did Spenser, Tasso, Ariosto, Racine, Corneille, 
and Milton ; and' it did not occur to their contempo- 
raries to accuse them of borrowing without acknowledg- 
ment. There was no acknowledgment needed. The 
poets thought that every one who read their classic 
phrases would know whence they came, and would un- 
derstand that they did not insert their original in a note, 
just because to do so would insult the culture of their 
readers. I do not suppose it occurred to Tennyson to 
explain that something in his Ulysses was owed to Dante, 
or that " Softer than sleep," or 

This way and that dividing the swift mind, 

and a hundred other lines and phrases, were from Virgil 
or Homer, Sophocles or Pindar, Catullus or Horace. 
He thought that every one would know these things, and 
he used them as we use, in writing, phrases from the 
Bible or Shakespeare without taking the trouble of put- 
ting them in inverted commas. Moreover, he may have 
thought that the world would be pleased to find lovely 
phrases which were the common property of all writers 
beautifully translated and delightfully reset. Of all the 



134 Tennyson 



half-suggested accusations made against Tennyson, this 
of plagiarism from the classic poets is, under the cir- 
cumstances, the most futile and the most invidious. 

Among these later classic poems, the first, in order of 
date, is Tithonus. I suppose from internal evidence 
that this poem, published in i860, was written not very 
long after the Ulysses. It has the same atmosphere of 
youthful feeling and the same technical maturity. It 
seems even finer than the Ulysses as a ^iece of art. In- 
deed, nothing of its kind approaches it in modern poetry, 
nor anything in which the imagination of Tennyson is at 
work with greater creativeness, insight, pathetic power, 
passion, noble sensuousness and simplicity. The sub- 
ject was also one of extraordinary difficulty. It was 
easy, in comparison, for Tennyson to write the Ulysses. 
That poem was built out of his own character, and em- 
bodied a type with which he had the strongest sympathy. 
But when he wrote of Tithonus he was obliged to get out 
of himself altogether, or, at least, to use up for his work 
not a constant, but a temporary attitude of his soul. 
Moreover, the scene was laid in a dim, unknown country, 
on the outskirts of the heaven and the earth, below the 
visible, where there was no landscape. This had to be 
realised, and it is done with full imagination, not only in 
the lines which describe the quiet limit of the world — 

The ever-silent spaces of the East, 
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn, 

but also in the impression made by the whole of the 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 135 

poem. Its world is not a world of night or day, but of 
the transitory dawn. Aurora herself seems to die at 
sunrise, and the description of her wakening — the glim- 
mer on her brow, her sweet eyes slowly brightening 
before they blind the stars, her wild team shaking the 
darkness from their loosened manes, and her departure, 
weeping for her chilly lover — is of the very finest 
quality. Yet, remote as the place is from humanity, 
Tennyson has filled his poem with pathetic emotion. 
Immortal age tied to immortal youth, immortal youth 
pained for immortal age ; the gift love gave of immor- 
tality the curse of him to whom it was given, the 
memory, in decay, of youth and of love once passionate, 
the dreadful inability to love, the dreadful inability to 
die — all is subtly, beautifully, and firmly realised. The 
very movement of the blank verse is tender with the 
irreparable woe of Tithonus. 

The main thought of the poem has often been used. 
Immortality for men, without youth, and with its mem- 
ories, is an accursed gift. Swift exposed the horror 
of it in his own savage fashion, lacerating himself and 
man with self-tormenting scorn. Tennyson has done it 
with exquisite tenderness for man ; and made the victim 
think gently of his own race, and truly of their fate : 

Why should a man desire in any way 
To vary from the kindly race of men — 
Of happy men that have the power to die ? 

Nor does he forget to touch the story with one of those 



136 Tennyson 



ancient thoughts which in all ages have expressed part 
of the tragic of our destiny : 

The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts. 

The next of these classic poems is Lucretius. It is 
Roman, not Greek, and it bears the impress of the 
Roman race. In Tennyson's Greek poems, the Greek's 
grave beauty shines through the modern thought, 
through the modern description of Nature. Even in 
speeches like those of Athena and of Ulysses, beauty 
sits hand in hand with the experience of life. But in 
Lucretius^ stern, robust, rigid duty to self-chosen, self- 
approved law is first ; the sense of the beautiful as a 
part of life does not appear in the poem. Lucretius 
has no religion save that of acceptance of Nature, but 
to that he is faithful. He has no duty to the gods, but 
he has duty to his own philosophic honour. He dies 
rather than be mastered by lustful visions which a 
Greek, even in the noble time when beauty meant pure 
harmony, would have gone through, smiled at, and for- 
gotten. 

The philosophy also is a Greek philosophy, but 
Lucretius has made it Roman in temper ; and one of 
the noble excellences of this poem is that Tennyson 
has never deviated in a single word from the Roman 
basis of the soul. Moreover, it takes a great poet to 
assimilate, as Tennyson has done, the essence of Lucre- 
tius as a thinker and a poet in the space of about three 
hundred lines, and to combine this with the representa- 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 137 

tion of a man in an hour of doom and madness, such 
as an inferior poet, overloading it with frenzied orna- 
ment, would have made intemperate. Tennyson's 
masterly reticence, rigid restraint only to the absolutely 
necessary, are supreme in this poem. Only one passage, 
that about the breasts of Helen and the sword, seems to 
me awkward in conception. 

The introduction is a little masterpiece of statement. 
In the rest of the poem, independent of the superb 
setting forth the Epicurean philosophy as grasped and 
dignified by Lucretius, two things belonging to the con- 
duct of the subject are remarkable. First, Tennyson 
has seized on the spasmodic action of a poison to enable 
him to represent Lucretius as having lucid intervals. A 
lesser artist would have kept him always in insanity. 
But Lucretius, whom the poet wishes us to respect 
while we pity him, is for the most part sane. The in- 
fluence of the philtre comes on him only in recurring 
attacks, and between the attacks his mind is clear. 
Even his moral power, that is, his truth to his own nature, 
maintains its mastery. Not for an instant does Tenny- 
son's Lucretius ever truly think that he is the same 
person as the man who sees the visions of lust. Not 
for a moment does he confuse his own Alma Venus, the 
ambrosial, warm and generative power in Nature, with 
the Cyprian goddess of desire whose dreams invade his 
soul. Lucretius is, in more than half this poem, the 
clear thinker, the noble poet, and the lover of passion- 
less tranquillity who abhors the storm within him. 



38 Tennyson 



Secondly, Tennyson invents, with the greatest skill, a 
storm in the night to illustrate the tempest in the soul 
of Lucretius, and at the same time to supply him with 
a ground for speaking of his Nature-philosophy. The 
storm suggests the dream of the flaring atom streams. 

Ruining along the illimitable inane — 

a line that Milton might have praised. The returning 
calm of the morning suggests the description of the 
eternal tranquillity of the gods and their dwelling-place, 
and to Lucretius, the hope that he may win back his own 
calm — 

Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile. 
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm, 
At random ravage. 

These are the methods of a great artist ; but how the 
whole poem is wrought, how nobly the character of 
Lucretius emerges line after line, with what poetic 
strength and sculpturing power his masculine passion 
clears its way to death till the brief close shuts up the 
tragedy, is for every reader to grasp as he has capacity. 

Tiresias^ though published in 1885, is a much earlier 
poem, perhaps of the same period as Lucretius. I class 
it here, because the subject, except in the universal 
thought of sacrifice of life for the good of the State, is 
not modernised at all. The lines about the gods being 
slower to forgive than human kings, and those describing 
the yearning of Tiresias, 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 139 

For larger glimpses of that more than man 

Which rolls the heavens, and lifts, and lays the deep, 

Yet loves and hates with mortal hates and loves, 

are fully classical ; and the way Tiresias thinks and feels 
throughout is not modern, save perhaps in one passage 
about the tyranny of all, and the tyranny of one. 

The poem is said by Tennyson himself to " date many 
a year ago." We may suppose then that he did not 
think it good enough to publish alongside of Titho7ius or 
Ulysses ; and indeed it falls far below these poems. It 
repeats itself, and the conclusion ought not to be so 
long ; though Tiresias, believed for the first time in his 
life, might well be excused a little garrulity. But any 
one may be glad to have a poem which contains that 
dazzling description of the landscape of the mountain- 
side in the blaze of the sun, and the royal image of 
Pallas Athene climbing from the bath in the secret 
olive glade, and the blinding light of her virgin eyes. 
Nor is the close less splendid in words and in the huge 
thought of the last line where the prophet pictures his 
final rest among the happy vales that 

Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume 
Of those who mix all odour to the gods 
On one far height in one far-shining fire. 

If Demeter and Persephone was written about the time 
at which it was published, in 1889, it is a wonderful 
proof of the persistence of mature power in old age. 
Tennyson was eighty years of age when this poem was 



140 Tennyson 



issued. It bears no traces of failing strength, or of out- 
worn imagination. Lines like 

The shrilly whinnyings of the team of Hell, 

or, 

The sun 
Burst from a swimming fleece of winter gray, 

are as clean-ringing and clear-eyed as any written in 
1842. The introduction, with the slow dawning of Per- 
sephone's recognition of the earth, and of her mother 
who is the Earth-mother, is as good as the introduction 
to Lucretius^ as delicate and tender as that is strong and 
austere. The imaginative thought which kept the sol- 
emn, unhuman darkness of Hades still in the eyes of 
Persephone — 

Child, those imperial, disimpassioned eyes 
Awed even me at first, thy mother — 

the rapid picture of the lonely Fates, 

And, following out 
A league of labyrinthine darkness, came 
On three gray heads beneath a gleaming rift, 

who "know not what they spin," and cry, "There is a 
Fate beyond us " ; the dream of Demeter, which this 
cry originates, of a race of younger and kindlier gods 
whose reign and worship will be love, and who will sub- 
due even Hades to their light ; the sense Tennyson in- 
fuses into his readers that this dream is born out of the 
heart of the kindly earth itself — not a Christian thought 
but an anticipation of that thought ; the ill-content of 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 141 

the Earth-goddess with the highest gods who are old in 
their careless tyranny, and the founding of this ill- 
content with them on the ground that she is naturally 
nearer than they to men and fonder than they of the 
works of men — is she not the mother of them all ? — the 
deep sympathy of Demeter with the earth-dwellers, and 
naturally her greater share in human passion — especially 
the most human of all passions, that of motherhood — all 
these ideas, in subtle, half-suggested images, passed 
through the fire of imagination and made lucid and crys- 
talline thereby, are wrought into the poem with a power 
which seems almost incredible in a poet of eighty years. 
The poem smells of the fruitful rain-washed earth ; 
the earth breathes and is pregnant and gives birth in it ; 
all her motherhood loves all her children from line to 
line of it. Motherhood, first of the earth, and then of 
Humanity, is the innermost being of the poem — the 
" deathless heart of motherhood." At last, in order to 
make this universal more particular and more at home 
with us, the personal motherhood of Demeter, the 
motherhood of one heart for one child, is driven home 
to our imagination. When she loses her child, she im- 
plores heaven for her, she wanders over all lands to find 
her, she forgets her own earth ; but the loveliest thing 
she does — and it is imagined with infinite tenderness — is 
to console all the troubled mothers of the world. She 
gives to failing children the same breast which nurtured 
Persephone — 

Thy breast to wailing infants in the night. 



142 Tennyson 



The Death of (Enone, the last of these poems, recalls 
the earliest of them, and the landscape is much the 
same, only, as it is winter in CEnone's heart, it is now 
winter by the cave and in the glade, where formerly, 
at the coming of the goddesses, the greensward of spring 
burst into fire. And Paris comes to see her as of old, 
but now 

Lame, crooked, reeling, livid, thro' the mist, 

to beg her to heal him of his grievous wound. She 
refuses ; a woman after ten years of brooding wrath and 
pain was not likely to forgive. He passes away into the 
mist, dies, and is burnt on a pyre by the shepherds. 
She flings herself on the pyre. I do not know the date 
of this poem — there can never be any proper study of 
Tennyson until all these late-published poems are accu- 
rately dated — but it is quite plain that the mind which 
grasped Ulysses^ Lucretius^ or even Tiresias, has here lost 
much of its power. It is well put together as a little 
tale ; but the subject is not seized by the right handles. 
I cannot guess to what idea or emotion in Tennyson's 
mind the story has been sacrificed, but it is sacrificed. 
It is too improbable that Paris should walk up Ida to 
call for CEnone, considering where and how he was 
wounded ; or stagger down the hill from her. If the 
art of the piece were made better by this change in the 
tale, this criticism would be nought ; but it is not made 
better, and the improbability is impossibility. Nor do I 
understand the husband and wife and widow business. 



Classical and Romantic Poems of 1842 143 

unless it be that Tennyson desired to express over again 
his devotion to the eternity and sanctity of the marriage 
relation. This is wholly out of place in the story. The 
union between Paris and the nymph CEnone was not a 
marriage nor anything that resembled it. When we 
come to 

Her husband in the flush of youth and dawn, 

we do not know where we are. We are certainly not on 
Ida. When we hear CEnone's answer to the cry of Paris 
for help, we are in the midst, not of the light unions 
between Greek mortals and the nymphs, but of the 
social moralities of England. 

Adulterer, 
Go back to thine adulteress and die ! 

This is not credible on the lips of OEnone. Still more 
strange is that which follows, still more distant from 
Greek thought. CEnone, the mountain nymph, dreams 
that Paris calls to her from the other world to come to 
him, and has repented his unfaithfulness : 

Come to me, 
CEnone ! I can wrong thee now no more, 
CEnone, my Qinone. 

Christian, it may be, but not Greek ; and, still more, not 
possible for a nymph to dream. And the end is equally 
out of the question. It is a pretty thought in itself, and 
might well belong to a mortal woman, even to an Orien- 
tal pagan, but it does not belong to a mountain nymph 



144 



Tennyson 



of the Greek imagination who never dreamt of mar- 
riage and would have smiled at any union of the kind : 

And all at once 
The morning light of happy marriage broke 
Thro' all the clouded years of widowhood, 
And muffling up her comely head, and crying 
" Husband ! " she leapt upon the funeral pile, 
And mixt herself with him and past in fire. 



I 




CHAPTER V 
THE PRINCESS 

/'N MEMORIAM is the most complete, most 
rounded to a polished sphere, of the larger poems 
of Tennyson ; the Idylls of the King is the most am- 
bitious ; Maud is the loveliest, most rememberable ; and 
The Princess is the most delightful. Holiday-hearted, 
amazingly varied, charming our leisured ease from page 
to page, it is a poem to read on a sunny day in one of 
those rare places in the world where " there is no clock 
in the forest," where the weight and worry of the past, 
the present, or the future, do not make us conscious of 
their care. There is no sorrow or sense of the sorrow 
of the world in it. The man who wrote it had reached 
maturity, but there is none of the heaviness of maturity 
in its light movement. It is really gay, as young as the 
Prince himself who is its hero ; and the dreams and de- 
sires of youth flit and linger in it as summer bees around 
the honied flowers. A great charm is thus given to the 
poem. We feel for it the affection which is bestowed 

on youthfulness by those who have passed by youthful- 
lo 145 



146 Tennyson 



ness, that half-regret, half-tenderness, and sweet memory 
in both, the sadness of which is not too much, and the 
pleasure of which is not too little. 

Mingled with the youthfulness in the poem is the 
serious thought of manhood. There is enough of grav- 
ity to dignify the subject-matter, and enough of play to 
take dulness out of the gravity. The poem is like the 
gray statue of Sir Ralph robed with Lilia's orange scarf 
and rosy silk. Of course, this twofold element adds to 
that variety which stirs new pleasure and new thinking 
from page to page. But beyond that, the scheme of the 
poem enabled Tennyson to invent all kinds of fantastic 
events that follow one another as thickly as they do in a 
romantic tale ; and he is up to the level of the invention 
required. One scarcely expects him to do this with 
ease. Inventiveness of incident lags somewhat in Tenny- 
son's work. The invention of the greater number of the 
episodes in the Idylls of the King is excellent. The in- 
vention of the events which carry on the story is not so 
good, and it is certainly not opulent. Moreover, we see 
in the dramas how slow-moving his inventiveness is ; 
their movement continually drags from the want of that 
which the dramatists call business. Here, however, the 
story runs along with a lively variety both of characters 
and events glancing and charming through it. 

This variety is still more increased by the mingling 
of ancient and modern in the poem — modern science 
jostling with ancient manners, modern dress with 
ancient arms, girls' colleges with tournaments ; the 



The Princess 147 



woman-question of to-day with the woman-ideal of the 
days of chivalry ; Joan of Arc with the Cambridge girl ; 
and the rising out of both — out of the old and the new 
— first, Tennyson's own view of womanhood, and sec- 
ondly, that which is always old and new, the eternal 
feminine face to face with the eternal masculine. More- 
over, this variety is kindled and brightened with the 
steady fire of Tennyson's imagination — not, in this 
poem, the imagination which pierces to the depths of the 
human heart (for the half-serious, half-grotesque form 
precluded that), but the imagination which illustrates 
human life by analogies drawn from Nature. Each 
comparison fits at every point ; and the things in Nature 
which are used as comparisons are not only described 
with extraordinary accuracy, choice, and truth, but are 
also seen with such love that their inmost heart is 
touched. When King Gama is sketched, his voice is 
cracked and small : 

But bland the smile that like a wrinkling wind 
On glassy water drove his cheek in lines. 

Cyril, the Prince's friend, " has a solid base of tempera- 
ment," but is on the surface lightly blown by impulse. 
He is like the water-lily, which starts and slides 

Upon the level in little puffs of wind, 
Tho' anchor'd to the bottom — such is he. 

The eyes of Lady Blanche, full of malice, are like 
"the green malignant light of coming storm," and the 



148 Tennyson 



line is charged with the very colour and rage of tempest 
on the horizon. There are two similes of the Princess 
in wrath, one in which the jewel on her brow is like 
'' the mystic fire on a masthead, prophet of storm," and 
the other where she stands above the tossing crowd of 
rebellious girls like a beacon-tower above the waves 
of tempest, which are as absolutely fitted to the emo- 
tions they illustrate as the glove to the hand. Her angry 
and scornful smile is compared — and the Nature picture 
is superb — to 

A stroke of cruel sunshine on the cliff, 

When all the glens are drown'd in azure gloom 

Of thunder-shower. 

When she is compassed by two armies and the noise of 
arms, she stands like a stately pine on an island, on each 
side of which a great cataract divides, " when storm is 
on the heights," and the torrents roll, 

Suck'd from the dark heart of the long hills — 

a splendid concentration of natural truth. When she 
knows that all her purpose is overthrown, Tennyson 
uses what he must often have himself seen from the 
downs of Freshwater to express her pain : 

As one that climbs a peak to gaze 
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud 
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night. 
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore, 
And suck the blinding splendour from the sand. 
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn, 
Expunge the world. 



The Princess 149 



This and the equally fine description of the whirlwind, 
tell of Nature in giant effort. But he can see the deli- 
cate, minute things of Nature just as clearly and describe 
them with equal force. There is an image of a maiden's 
thoughts and ways which is as new as it is lovely. 

Not a thought, a touch 

But pure as Hnes of green that streak the white 
Of the first snow-drop's inner leaves. 

And when he wishes to reveal how two young hearts slid 
into love, he says it was no more strange 

Than when two dew-drops on the petal shake 
To the same sweet air, and tremble deeper down, 
And slip at last all-fragrant into one. 

A perfect image — but to what minute observation it 
bears witness ! In these examples alone what a range 
of vision ! How many things and sights were noted 
and stored up before these were chosen to use ! In 
what a lucid light they were seen ! With what truth, 
and, more difficult still to do, with what clearness, fit- 
ness, finish, and choice expressed ! This is the artist's 
keen eye, observant love and trained capacity, working 
together, and it is a pleasure to be led by it to observe 
more lovingly the world of Nature. From point to point 
this method of illustrating — a method he learned from 
Homer — enlightens and expands the poem. 

These belong to the qualities of Tennyson's mind, 
but in the prologue and epilogue of The Princess^ as 
well as in the poem itself, we have a picture of some 



150 Tennyson 



points in his character. He feels that he is of the 
North rather than of the South. 

And dark and true and tender is the North, 
is a line in which he paints what he wished to be. His 
Prince is of the North, and has that special mysticism 
of the North which appears in the dreams so constantly 
told in the Icelandic Sagas. He frequently loses con- 
sciousness of the outward, or rather he loses the con- 
sciousness of its reality. All around him becomes 
visionary, or the visionary world becomes the real world, 
till he is not able to distinguish between both. 

On a sudden in the midst of men and day, 
And while I walk'd and talk'd as heretofore, 
I seem'd to move among a world of ghosts, 
And feel myself the shadow of a dream — 

That is Tennyson. He talks of it as a " weird seizure," 
but it is a common experience. The sudden unsubstan- 
tialising of the outward world, of all events and places, 
was Wordsworth's frequent feeling. It is not, indeed, 
the unique property of the poets, but it brings before us 
the half-pantheistic idealism which dwelt in Tenny- 
son's nature side by side with his sturdy realism. The 
same experience is alluded to in The Holy Grail^ and is 
put in the mouth of Arthur : 

Let visions of the night or of the day 
Come, as they will ; and many a time they come. 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth. 
The light that strikes his eyeball is not light. 
This air that smites his forehead is not air, 
But vision — yea, his very hand and foot — 



The Princess 151 



Right opposite to this is that rough forcibleness, that 
downright squareness which in him called a spade a 
spade, and which is at the root of so many of the poems. 
Both opposites were well represented in his figure — the 
great-boned, loose-limbed, gigantesque man, with his 
domed head — and the soft dark hair, the gentle eyes, 
and the white, smooth, fine-lined brow, covered with deli- 
cate skin through which the blue veins shone. Force 
and fineness were married in his face and form as well 
as in his verse. 

Then in this prologue and epilogue there are other 
characteristics of what he had become. His fancy for 
science, and for the age in which he lived being made 
great by science, which springs to light in Locksley Hall^ 
has grown in this poem. His Princess's favourite study 
is the Natural Sciences. She thinks that learning and 
philosophy will be the salvation of women. The holi- 
day-makers in the prologue are taught by facts ; elec- 
tricity, steam, hydraulics go hand-in-hand with the 
rustics sports. We have somewhat too much of this. 
An artist cannot introduce Physical Science into his art- 
work without introducing trouble into it. Now and 
again he may play with its results, but it must be play. 
Tennyson did not always play with it, and he sometimes 
seemed to feel that Science was more important than 
Art. Whenever he did, his poetry suffered. However, 
there are traces enough, especially in his later poems, 
that he was weary of the claim of Science to be greater 
than Art, and that he feared it might stifle poetry : 



152 Tennyson 



Let Science prove we are, and then, 
What matters Science unto men, 
At least to me ? 



And he speaks still more particularly in a poem, the 
Parnassus of 1889 : 

What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain, 

Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain ? 

On those two known peaks they stand ever spreading and 
heightening ; 

Poet, that evergreen laurel is blasted by more than lightning ! 

Look, in their deep double shadow the crown'd ones all disap- 
pearing ! 

Sing like a bird and be happy, nor hope for a deathless hearing ! 

" Sounding for ever and ever ? " Pass on ! the sight confuses — 

These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses ! 

It makes me happier to read that poem, for I know then 
that he was saved from the impertinent despotism which 
claims that the reasoning intellect is higher than the 
imagination, and the work of Science of more impor- 
tance to man than the work of Art. We see then, that, 
in his old age, Tennyson felt that beauty and the repre- 
sentation of it were being crowded out of the world 
by Science. But we also see in the end of that 
poem how he consoles himself. " If the poets," he 
answers, " are crushed here, they need not greatly care. 
They sing their songs for ever, and other worlds listen." 
Then, too, his political judgments appear ; and 
though I have already alluded to them in the introduc- 
tion to this book, it seems needful to touch on them 
again in connection with this prologue. We find the 



The Princess 153 



honest Whig views of 1840, modified from their uni- 
versal aims by a cherished insularity ; a fancy for the 
squirearchy as the backbone of England ; a sense that 
the English temper, of which he knew nothing below the 
middle class, is the only temper in which freedom 
grows straight. With this there is a steady contempt for 
France, modified by the thought which seems at some 
odd moments to have made a lodgment in his mind, 
that social theories and dreams and the wild popular 
storms that follow them may be of more use than we 
think. It occurs to him at times that the world does 
not always move as England moves, by broadening 
slowly down from precedent to precedent. It may be 
there is some use and need, he thinks, for revolutions. 
The passage I mean begins : 

" Look there, a garden ! " said my college friend, 
The Tory member's elder son, 

and he points to the coast of France, and contrasts 
" our Britain whole within herself, a nation yet," having 
a sense of duty, reverence for law, some civic manhood 
firm against the crowd, with France and the mock 
heroics of France. And the whole speech and the reply 
to it are replete with Tennyson, of the same mint as the 
poem, " Love thou thy land with love far brought," in 
the volume of 1842. *' Have patience," answers another 
friend, " ourselves are full of social wrong." It is 
Tennyson's modification of the insular view. And 
indeed, in 1847, the state of the agricultural labourer, 



154 Tennyson 



here pictured on one day of holiday and feasting in the 
year, under the generosity of Sir Walter, 

A great, broad-shoulder'd, genial Englishman, 

was scarcely an inch better than it was in the year 1830, 
when all rural England was a cry of misery. One of 
the similes in The Princess is derived from the rick- 
burning into which the horrors of starvation and dis- 
ease had driven the people. Of all this, Tennyson had 
either little conception— only a few cared then, and he 
was of his time — or he was absorbed in the glory of that 
English country life in hall and park and comfortable 
farm which he paints so well, as if that included more 
than a tenth of the rural population. What of the rest ? 
The time thought little of them, neither did Tennyson ; 
and the crowd around the abbey where The Princess is 
invented are content to cry, and Tennyson seems to 
think it is enough for them to ask — 

Why should not these great Sirs 
Give up their parks some dozen times a year 
To let the people breathe ? 

This is Tennyson in the prologue. As to the poem, 
itself, it enshrines the woman's question as it appeared 
nearly fifty years ago, and considering all that has been 
done since then, it is a prophetic utterance. A good 
deal which is here suggested under a mock-heroic mask 
has actually been put into practical form. Moreover, he 
has touched, with grace and clearness, a number of the 
phases of opinion which now prevail, and which then 



The Princess 155 



had only begun to prevail ; embodying each phase in 
one of his characters. The woman's question owes a 
great deal to The Princess. It has been objected to it 
by the women who want humour (that want so strange 
and yet so common in women) and who have the faith 
that science solves all questions (that faith so unex- 
pected by those who have the traditional conception of 
a special spirituality in women), " that the poem is not 
serious, not argumentative, not set on a foundation of 
facts. The question can only be solved by knowledge, 
argument, and action." 

This objection would be valid if this were a treatise, 
and not a poem. But here the question is brought into 
the sphere of art, and it must be treated in the manner 
of art. If it is to be made the subject of a poem, it 
must not be argumentative, it must not be scientific, and 
it must not be serious except when emotion intervenes. 
The moment it argues, it loses its place in the world of 
art. Every point then which would naturally be argued 
by the understanding in a treatise, must here be worked 
by the imagination ; and lest the poem should by any 
chance slide into reasoning, a gamesome element is 
added to it, to protect it from becoming scientific. 
Tennyson, who was an artist, understood this clearly, 
and wrought out his method with care before he began. 
He is never serious in The Princess^ except when the 
deep affections of humanity enter into the movement of 
the piece ; and the affections, in spite of all the wise- 
acres, are not subject to logic. Science, if it have the 



156 Tennyson 



insolence to ascend the steps of their palace, falls dead 
upon its threshold. When, then, the affections come in, 
Tennyson steps into seriousness, but when he has to put 
opinions, he is light and gay ; and art obliged him, on 
such a subject, to be serious and gay by turns. The 
result was, that he was compelled to choose a mock- 
heroic form in which to build his poem. This would 
enable him to be sometimes lively and sometimes grave, 
sometimes grotesque and sometimes noble, sometimes 
chivalrous and sometimes full of raillery, and sometimes 
mingling both these opposites ; and the choice of this 
mode of building his poem gave him great room for 
ranging, and varied opportunities for imagination. 
"What style would suit?" he asks. 

The men required that I should give throughout 

The sort of mock-heroic gigantesque, 

"With which we banter'd little Lilia first : 

The women — and perhaps they felt their power, 

For something in the ballads which they sang, 

Or in their silent influence as they sat. 

Had ever seem'd to wrestle with burlesque, 

And drove us, last, to quite a solemn close — 

They hated banter, wish'd for something real, 

A gallant fight, a noble princess — why 

Not make her true-heroic — true sublime ? 

Or all, they said, as earnest as the close? 

Which yet with such a framework scarce could be. 

Then rose a little feud betwixt the two, 

Betwixt the mockers and the realists : 

And I, betwixt them both, to please them both, 

And yet to give the story as it rose, 

I moved as in a strange diagonal. 

And maybe neither pleased myself nor them. 



The Princess 157 



It is not often that an artist explains the way in which 
he came to choose the form of his architecture, but, 
tiven his subject, he could not have chosen it better. 
/The Prince has been betrothed to a Princess in the 
South, and made her his ideal, loving her from her por- 
trait. His father sends an embassage to claim her for 
his son. His claim is put off ; the Princess refuses to 
marry. She, enthralled with the idea of rescuing women 
from the slavery of man, has founded a college for girls 
into which no man shall enter on pain of death. The 
Prince with two college friends goes on adventure to 
find the Princess. They disguise themselves as girls 
and penetrate into the college, betray themselves, are 
discovered, and would have been slain, had not the 
Prince saved the life of the Princess. The three men 
are thrust out of gates with contumely. The Princess 
refuses all overtures of marriage, and summons her three 
brothers, huge warriors, to support her cause. Both 
sides agree to settle the question by a tournament of 
fifty against fifty knights, and the Prince and his party 
are wounded and overthrown. Ida, the Princess, moved 
by the fate of a child who is the pivot of the action here, 
admits all the wounded to the college, dissolves the col- 
lege, and, in tending the wounded Prince, finds love at 
her heart, and they are knit together. These are the 
main lines of the story. | Each of these male characters 
has his own opinion about womanhood and its sphere, 
the Prince and his father, Cyril and Florian the two 
friends of the Prince, the King, the father of the Prin- 



1 58 Tennyson 



cess, and Arac her brother. Six men then deliver six 
views of womanhood, embodying six phases of the ques- 
tion. Then the women have also their say. We heai* 
the view of the mother of the Prince who is dead ; we 
have the view of Lady Blanche who educated the Prin- 
cess to despise love and set women against men ; of 
the Princess's friend, Lady Psyche, who is the child's 
mother ; of Melissa, a young maiden, and of the mob 
of girls at college ; finally, of the Princess herself ; so 
that through the piece almost every phase of opinion on 
the matter is delivered by both men and women. This 
is done with great skill and charming art. In the midst, 
the various offices of womanhood are brought forward by 
the events of the story, and become part of the question 
to be solved. Moreover, what motherhood is, is shown 
in two instances ; what maidenhood is, is also displayed. 
And woman's friendship with woman is introduced. 
All these, both those which belong to the men and those 
which belong to the women, run up at last into the Prin- 
cess and are bound around her, so that she stands forth 
alone, the centre of the poem. They also run up into 
the Prince, but he is kept subordinate, as the poem de- 
manded, even when, at the end, he gets his way. His 
opinion prevails, but his personality is less than that of 
the Princess. This is all admirable art. 

The scenery, too, of the pi^ce is delightful, full of 
sunshine, gaiety, and grace. The college, with its 
grounds and high-wrought architecture, courts and gar- 
dens, walls and fountains, brightened with glancing girls 



The Princess 159 



and silken-clad professors, is charmingly imagined. We 
see the view from its walls. The Prince stands upon the 
northern terrace : 

And leaning there on those balusters, high 
Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale 
That blown about the foliage underneath, 
And sated with the innumerable rose. 
Beat calm upon our eyelids. 

We watch the Princess, creator of all this beauty, in the 
great hall, in the fountain-splashing courts, in the gar- 
dens, among the hills which border the park, on the great 
meadows of the tumbling river, erect upon the battle- 
ments above the gates — and we see grouped around her, 
the whole country, as if with the actual eye. Then we 
look on the warrior camps, on the tournament and on 
the battle-field ; and then on the women, issuing from 
the great bronze valves, and moving through the trees to 
tend the wounded. And, last of all, we see the college 
again, its building filled with the wounded, and the girls 
who stayed flitting through it from couch to couch, 
or learning love in its bosky alleys. So vividly is it all 
drawn, that a painter might paint from point to point 
what the poet has created. The passage beginning — 

We dropt with evening on a rustic town, 
Set in a gleaming river's crescent-curve. 
Close at the boundary of the liberties, 

will illustrate this careful scene-painting — a word I use 
without its depreciating note. 

Nature is not described for her own sake, but inwoven 



i6o Tennyson 



in Tennyson's manner with the emotions of those who 
are looking upon it. When the Prince, full of youthful 
ardour, resolves to follow his dream, all the woods and 
wind are with him ; her picture lies 

In the green gleam of dewy-tassell'd trees, 

and all the mingled sounds of woods are shaken into 
one cry of " Follow, follow." The lines I quote below 
exactly express that which is so rarely observed — the 
different murmur of differently foliaged trees in a faint 
wind which a fine ear can distinguish in a wood, but 
which, when a fuller puff goes by, are merged into one 
chorus with the singing of birds and tossing of boughs : 

A wind arose and rush'd upon the South, 

And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks 

Of the wild woods together ; and a Voice 

Went with it, " Follow, follow, thou shalt win." 

When the Prince has reached the college where the 
Princess lives, this fine picture of the sea at night is 
equally descriptive of the fulness of his heart, and the 
prophecy it makes and loves. 

Half in doze I seem'd 
To float about a glimmering night, and watch 
A full sea, glazed with muffled moonlight, swell 
On some dark shore just seen that it was rich. 

And when the dawn of love in the Princess's heart is 
beginning, the early dawn of nature to which he com- 
pares it was never more fully or more tenderly imagined 
than in these lines of lovely simplicity — 



The Princess i6i 



Till notice of a change in the dark world 
"Was lispt about the acacias, and a bird, 
That early woke to feed her little ones, 
Sent from a dewy breast a cry for light. 

In the poem, however, there is no elaborate descrip- 
tion of landscape. The Nature touches are chiefly in 
the comparisons ; and this is fitly so, for the human 
interest is manifold. In a single-subject poem like The 
Gardener s Daughter or CEnone^ it is not out of place to 
have a long description of Nature. The full scenery 
then illustrates and enforces the simple subject. But 
long descriptions of Nature in a story with many char- 
acters and events, would divert the interest from the 
movement. Like Homer then, and following him, 
Tennyson keeps his Nature in this heroic tale chiefly for 
his similes, to strengthen from time to time moments of 
passion in the tale. 

The one piece, moreover, in the poem which is fully 
descriptive of Nature, is not in the story. It is a part 
of an interlude — the Idyll read by the Princess while 
she sits by the bedside of the Prince. In its midst 
is a noble and unique gathering together of the sights 
and sounds and of the destroying horror of the deep 
recesses of the upper Alpine gorges, followed by a con- 
centration into three lines of the sweetness and charm 
of the pastoral vales of the Alps. " Come down, sweet 
maid," cried the shepherd from the heights, " for love 
is of the valley." Love does not care to walk 

With Death and Morning on the silver horns. 
Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine, 



i62 Tennyson 

Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice, 

That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls 

To roll the torrent out of dusky doors : 

But follow ; let the torrent dance thee down 

To find him in the valley : let the wild 

Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave 

The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill 

Their thousand wreaths of dangling Avater-smoke, 

That like a broken purpose waste in air ; 

So waste not thou : but come ; for all the vales 

Av.-ait thee ; azure pillars of the hearth 

Arise to thee ; the children call, and I 

Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound. 

Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet ; 

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn. 

The moan of doves in immemorial elms. 

And murmuring of innumerable bees. 

Finally, with regard to the poem as distinguished from 
the social question it speaks of, beauty is kept in it pre- 
eminent. 

It is first in Tennyson's, as it ought to be in every 
artist's heart. The subject-matter is bent to the ne- 
cessity of beauty. The knowledge displayed in it, the 
various theories concerning womanhood, the choice of 
scenery, the events, are all chosen and arranged so as to 
render it possible to enshrine them in beautiful shapes. 
This general direction towards loveliness is never lost 
sight of by the poet. It is not that moral aims are 
neglected, or the increase of human good, or the height- 
ening of truth, or the declaring of knowledge ; but it is 
that all these things are made subservient to the mani- 
festation of beauty. It is the artist's way, and it is the 
highest way. To say this seems to many to say the 



The Princess 163 

wrong thing. To put the manifestation of beauty on a 
higher level than the manifestation of morality or knowl- 
edge appears to them to be too bold. It is to say that 
Art does more for the world, and teaches better things 
than either Science or Ethics. But the saying does not 
seem so strange when we define beauty as the form of 
love, and its innumerably various images as the images 
of the thoughts of love. 

The underlying cause of beauty in all art is this love 
in the artist's soul, as well as the love which, existing in 
others and in nature outside of himself, he represents in 
his art. The greater the artist, the greater his capacity 
for loving and for seeing and feeling in men and women 
what is loving. The greater too is his desire for creat- 
ing its images and the intensity with which he strives to 
perfect his gift of creation. This was the longing, and 
this the strife of Tennyson from end to end of his life. 

The Princess is only one illustration of these things. 
The woman's .question is not by itself a lovely thing. 
But it is made beautiful in The Frificess^ because every 
one of its issues is solved by love, by an appeal to some 
kind or another of love — to filial love, to motherly love, 
to the associated love of friendship, to the high and 
sacred love between a maiden and her lover, to the nat- 
ural love which without particular direction arises out 
of pity for the helpless, and to the love we feel for the 
natural world. Thus the various questions that issue 
out of the main question, and the main question itself, 
are answered by showing what love would naturally 



164 Tennyson 



reply. Now the effects of true love are always beauti- 
ful, and he who represents them with love and joy 
embodies beauty. 

So Tennyson made the woman's question lovely. But 
he was so exalted by this abiding in love that he could 
not help at times in the poem breaking out into lyric 
songs, in which he might express a keener feeling of 
beauty, and reach a higher range of poetry than in tlie 
rest of the poem, where the subject forbade him to rise 
above a certain level. So he wrote in the midst of the 
poem two love-songs, one of the sorrow of love past by 
for ever, of the days that are no more ; another of 
the joyful hope of love, of the days that were to come. 
The first of these, Tea?'s^ idle tears, as I have already 
said, represents more nearly than any of the songs of 
Tennyson, but chiefly in the last verse, one phase, at 
least, of the passion of love between man and woman. 
It does not represent its enjoyment, but the wild regret 
of its continued existence in unfulfilment. The three 
verses which lead up to this intense climax with slow 
and soft approaches are drenched through and through, 
more than any other regretful song I know, more even 
than any of Shelley's songs, in the heavy dew of long 
and living sorrow for love just touched but unattained. 

The Princess hears the song and calls its tone to order. 

If indeed there haunt 
About the moulder'd lodges of the past 
So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men, 
Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool 
And so pass by. 



The Princess 165 



Then rising on a wave of hope and effort, she bids 

her girls sail on to the great year to come, and in one of 

the noblest similes in the poem, Tennyson paints the 

disappearance of the mightiest ideas, of the past in the 

warm life of the future. 

While down the streams that float us each and all 
To the issue, goes, like glittering bergs of ice, 
Throne after throne, and molten on the waste 
Becomes a cloud. 

At this the Prince, emboldened, sings of hope in love ; 
a mere love poem the Princess calls it, in her fresh dis- 
dain. " Great is song," she says, " used to great ends " ; 
" duer unto freedom, force, and growth of spirit than to 
junketing and love," phrases which represent Tennyson's 
own view, in certain moods, of the aim of Poetry. Yet 
the song is lovely in movement ; its wing-beating and 
swift-glancing verse is like the flight of the bird that has 
suggested it. 

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying south. 

Both songs are unrhymed, yet no one needs the rhyme, 
so harmoniously is their assonance arranged, not so 
much at the end of each line as in the body of the lines 
themselves. Tears, idle tears is a masterpiece of the 
careful employment of vowels. 

The song of triumph which Ida sings is also un- 
rhymed. The comparison of the cause of woman to 
a tree is too elaborate in detail, and is not throughout 
well developed, but the last verse has its own splendour, 
and the tree becomes a Universe-tree. 



1 66 Tennyson 



Our enemies have fall'n, but this shall grow, 
A night of summer from the heat, a breadth 
Of autumn, dropping fruits of power ; and roll'd 
With music in the growing breeze of Time, 
The tops shall strike from star to star, the fangs 
Shall move the stony bases of the world. 

The last song in the body of the poem : 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, nov/ the white : 

is still unrhymed, and might be called the palace-song 
of love, so full is it with the rich and lovely things which 
belong to the royal gardens of the earth, when night in 
a clear sky has fallen on them. But of itself, the song 
and the love in it are not of much worth. 

When Tennyson, however, had read over what he had 
done, the overwhelming mastery of love, of love of every 
kind, which fills the poem, urged him to new creation, 
and he celebrates love in six of its various phases — in 
six delightful and happy songs, inserted in the third 
edition between the main divisions of the poem. They 
were, he says, ballads or songs to give the poets breath- 
ing space. So 

The women sang 
Between the rougher voices of the men. 
Like linnets in the pauses of the wind. 

They are all of a sweet and gentle humanity, of a fasci- 
nating and concentrated brevity, of common moods of 
human love made by the poet's sympathy and art to 
shine like the common stars we love so well. The fall- 
ing out of wife and husband reconciled over the grave 



The Princess 167 



of their child, the mother singing to her babe of his 
father coming home from sea, the warrior in battle 
thinking of his home, the iron grief of the soldier's wife 
melted at last into tears by his child laid upon her knee, 
the maiden yielding at last to love she had kept at bay — 
these are the simple subjects of these songs. They 
please this large poet, he was at home in them, and as 
long as human nature lasts they will please the world, 
because they will endear love to the world. 
Among these the cradle song, 

Sweet and low, sweet and low, 
Wind of the western sea, 

is the most beautiful and writes, as it were, its own 
music, but the song, 

The splendour falls on castle walls, 
And snowy summits old in story, 

is the noblest, a clear, uplifted, softly-ringing song. It 
sings, in its short compass, of four worlds, of ancient 
chivalry, of wild nature, of romance where the horns of 
Elfland blow, and of the greater future of mankind. 
And in singing of the last, it touches the main subject 
of love, love not of person to person, but of each life 
to all the lives that follow it : 

Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 
Ard grow for ever and for ever. 

Yet it is the lover who tells this to his sweetheart, and 
the universal element is made delicate by its union with 



1 68 Tennyson 



the personal love of these two happy creatures. It is 
well that the soul of man should enter into the close of 
the song, but the greatest poetical beauty has been 
reached in the second verse, where by a magical employ- 
ment of words the whole world of Elfland is created, 
and with it all the romantic tales echo in the ear. 

These are the songs of this delightful poem, and it is 
with some difficulty that we turn away from them to 
speak of the way in which Tennyson has treated the 
social side of his subject. It seems necessary, however, 
to discuss for a little time his views of the woman's 
question. 






^^m 


H 


1 






M 


^^%^ 





w 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PRINCESS {Continued) 

THE woman's question 

HEN, in Locksley Hal/, Tennyson makes his 
hero, in his anger, cry 



Weakness to be wroth with weakness ! woman's pleasure, woman's 

pain — 
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain ; 
Woman is the lesser man, 

it appears as if the woman's question had already occu- 
pied his mind. It continued to dwell with him, for 
in Edwin Morris, a poem published four years after 
The Princess, the curate, Edward Bull, who was fatter 
than his cure, answers his friend, a poet, to whom his 
sweetheart's 

least remark was worth 
The experience of the wise, 

that this idealising of the woman was all nonsense. 

" I take it," said he 

God made the woman for the man, 
And for the good and increase of the world. 
169 



i7o Tennyson 



A pretty face is well, and this is well, 
To have a dame indoors, that trims us up, 
And keeps us tight : but these unreal ways 
Seem but the theme of writers, and indeed 
Worn threadbare. Man is made of solid stuff. 
I say, God made the woman for the man, 
And for the good and increase of the world. 

This is a more Philistine opinion concerning the object 
of a woman's life than even those held by the kings in 
The Princess. Tennyson did not agree with that view 
'being exhaustive : 

" Parson," said I, " you pitch the pipe too low ! " 

At what note he wished the pipe pitched, we hear in 
The Princess ; and I write throughout of the poem as it 
was finished in editions subsequent to that published 
in 1847. 

The subject is introduced in the Prologue. A story 
is read of a feudal heroine of Sir Walter's house (in 
whose grounds the company are met who make the 
poem), who rather than yield to the wild will of a king, 
took arms and conquered him. " Where lives," asks 
one, " such a woman now ? " And Lilia, Sir Walter's 
daughter, replies : 

' ' There are thousands now 
Such women, but convention beats tliem down ; 
It is but bringing up ; no more than that : 
You men have done it ; how I hate you all ! 

O I wish 
That I were some great princess, I would build 



The Princess 



171 



Far off from men a college like a man's, 

And I would teach them all that men are taught ; 

We are twice as quick ! 

But I would make it death 
For any male thing but to peep at us." 

The whole question (as Tennyson told it from the 
woman's side) is there laid down ; and out of Lilia's 
wish grows the tale. Her view is the same as that of 
Ida, the Princess. When Ida, however, was young, she 
dreamt that the man was equal to the woman, but that 
each was the half of the other, that each fulfilled defect 
in each, and that together they became the perfect 
being. This is the view of the Prince at the end of the 
book, and Ida says the dream was once hers. But when 
we find her at the beginning of the poem, this is not her 
view. Women have been made either toys or slaves by 
men ! Their will, their faculties, their very characters, 
have been lost in those of men ; their weakness taken 
advantage of, their ignorance encouraged that they may 
be kept in subjection. " Women have been great," she 
cries with indignation, '' great in war, great in govern- 
ment, great in science, great in the work of the world. 
Why should they not always be as great ? I will make 
it so. They shall be 

living wills, and sphered 
Whole in themselves, and owed to none." 

She sees thus both types of womanhood, the enslaved 
and the free ; but she sees only one type of men in their 
relation to women — those who treat them " either as 



72 Tennyson 



vassals to be beaten or pretty babes to be dandled." It 
was not wise for the sake of her cause to be thus one- 
sighted. It began the battle by taking up a position on 
half a truth. She did wrong to set aside as unworthy, 
or to be angry with, the opinions of those men who 
either idealised women, or said that they were the 
equals of men, but in dissimilar qualities. It was part 
of her theory of isolation to despise all the views of men 
on her sex, good and bad alike ; and this foolish con- 
tempt is even now one of the reasons for the failure or 
the slow advance of the cause of woman. 

She makes two more mistakes. What do women 
need, she asks, to level them with man ? They want 
nothing but knowledge. Equality of knowledge will 
equalise them with men. And that they may gain this 
knowledge, even be free to gain it, there is only one way 
— isolation from man. The thing needed and the 
way to win it are thus both laid down, and both are 
mistakes, then and now. 

So the college is established. Here, she says, the 
women shall be moulded to the fuller day ; and then, 
when the girls are trained at all points as men are 
trained ; then, when the secular emancipation of half 
the world will have been wrought, why then, afterwards, 
let women marry — and everywhere shall be 

Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, 
Two in the tangled business of the world, 
Two in the liberal offices of life, 
Two plummets dropt from one to sound the abyss 



The Princess 173 

Of science, and the secrets of the mind ; 
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, more ; 
And everywhere the broad and bounteous earth 
Shall bear a double growth of those rare souls, 
Poets, whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world. 

But at present, till the work be done, death to the 
man who enters the college gates. " Let there be no 
love yet between man and maid. For there lies our 
weakness — in our leaning to tenderness, in our personal 
cry for love. I, for one, will never wed." " What," 
says the Prince, " have neither love, children, happi- 
ness, what every woman counts her due ? " " Love ? " 
she answers, " I have left its feeble fancy behind me. 
Children ? Would that they grew like flowers — and yet, 
in our love of them, we lose the higher things. They 
kill us with pity, bi'eak us with ourselves ! " She feels in 
that phrase her great difficulty — that Nature is against 
her — feels it, but does not realise it. She dreads her 
own womanhood. Yet, she sees no other way of action ; 
isolation from man is necessary to re-establish the just 
equality of woman. This is her position, and it includes 
a denial of natural love which smacks of Lady Blanche, 
the grim, disappointed woman whom Tennyson creates 
in order to motive Ida's exclusion of natural affection 
from her plan. We excuse then what was foolish in 
Ida's effort ; it is not wholly her fault — but at the same 
time we lose some of our respect for her intelligence. 
For to deliberately knock her head against the certain- 
ties, to believe that they are not certainties and can be 
dodged, is the greatest of follies. To ignore love between 



1 74 Tennyson 



the sexes is one of the little games some women play 
in the battle for their rights. On the contrary, one 
of the axioms they ought to lay down in the planning 
of their struggle is that this kind of love is certain to 
arise. 

This union made by love is not the only union 
which ought to exist between man and woman. All the 
work of the world ought to be done by both of the 
sexes in harmonious and equal co-operation, each sex 
taking what fits best its hand. Without this union the 
world's work is only half done. And with regard to 
the woman's cause itself, it can make no progress as 
long as the law that in all work both sexes should labour 
together is disobeyed. In obedience to that law, which 
Tennyson in this book meant to dwell upon (at least so 
far as regards the aim of the Princess), the proper and 
successful conduct of the woman's cause is everywhere 
contained. Women sometimes deny this, and try to 
carry out their aims independent of men. I do not 
wonder that they make the effort, for men have long 
shut out women from any active share in a great num- 
ber of their ends, isolating women in home alone. 
None, indeed, have violated more than men the law 
which is here laid down. In that has lain the most cry- 
ing mistake of civilisation. Owing to that disobedience 
the whole progress of humanity has made only half the 
way it would otherwise have done. Government, law, 
religion, literature, art, commerce, science of all kinds, 
social order and progress, national and international 



The Princess 



75 



union, are all only developed to half the excellence 
they would have reached, had women shared in them as 
co-workers with men. But the more women believe that 
this is true, the more foolish it would be for them, for 
the sake of a petty vengeance or a personal pique, to 
perpetrate, even at one single point, the same folly — to 
isolate their work from men as men have isolated their 
work from women in the past. On the contrary — 
always together, as Nature means. Tennyson saw this 
up to a certain point, and now and again in this poem 
seems to infer the whole of it. But he did not really go 
so far. He seems to keep himself within equality in 
married life. But his principle goes beyond that sphere. 
Day by day his limits fade away. 

This, then, was Ida's first mistake — isolation of woman 
from man. The second was that she thought knowledge 
alone was enough to lift woman into equality with man, 
to rescue her from her position as toy or slave. Knowl- 
edge, of course, is good ; the more knowledge women 
get the better. It is an absolute necessity. But alotie it 
injures more than assists their cause. It does part of 
their work ; it cannot possibly do all. It can destroy 
the opinions which make women dolls to be played with 
or vassals to be exploited. It can supply them with the 
tools necessary to carve their way upwards, to take up 
the works that men assume as only theirs ; but it cannot 
supply the spirit which feels the right way to do these 
things ; it cannot create the imaginative or spiritual 
powers which illuminate or kindle work : nor can it 



1 76 Tennyson 

enable womanhood to guard her own nature from its 
excesses or defects. By itself, it is weak, save to destroy 
ignorance or prejudice. And by itself, it has its own 
prejudices, its own blindness. Worst of all, it has its 
own vanity, and the vanity of knowledge is the most 
successful corrupter and overthrower of the noble 
causes for which mankind has fought and suffered. If 
this vanity of knowledge should prevail among women 
(and they are peculiarly liable to it) their cause will 
break up, the positions they have won will be lost. One 
of its tendencies, when women think that knowledge is 
all they need, is to lead them to deny or minimise the 
radical difference of sex on which Tennyson dwells so 
much. It is an astonishing piece of folly. Only women 
could have the audacity to contradict one of the prime- 
val facts of the universe. It is a case where the vanity 
of knowledge devours knowledge itself. 

Again, when knowledge, full of its self-admiration, 
neglects or denies the imagination, the affections, the 
sentiment of life ; when it passes by beauty as j{ no im- 
portance and looks on the ideal faiths of man as folly — 
there is nothing which is so certain to take the wrong 
road, and to ruin the cause it boasts that it supports. 
Any one of the emotional, imaginative, and spiritual 
powers of nature directs and moves personal and collec- 
tive human life more than the intellectual power directed 
to the objects of knowledge. With all their tendency to 
run into extremes these powers are safer guides than 
mere knowledge in the affairs of daily life and in the 



The Princess 177 



working of great human causes. Each of them — emo- 
tional, imaginative, or spiritual — needs knowledge, and 
to let any one of them act without knowledge is as fool- 
ish as to let knowledge act without them. But even 
when one of them does act alone, it does not do quite as 
much harm to the progress of humanity as knowledge 
does, when it isolates itself in its pride as the only mas- 
ter of action or the only guide of thought. 

And many women in the present day seem to look 
with a certain contempt on sentiment, on imagination, 
on beauty and art, on the affections, on the high pas- 
sions of the ideal or of the religious life. It is a fatal 
pride, and a folly for which they will sorely suffer. 
Women do not want less emotion but larger emotion, 
nobler and less personal direction of emotion ; more of 
love and not less, more true passion and not less ; more 
sense of beauty and not less ; more imagination, more 
of the energy of faith working by love, more sacrifice of 
self, that is, more universal, less particular sacrifice. 
Education in these they want above all, and they want 
it at present more than men. 

These, then, were the two great errors into which the 
Princess fell, and they defeated her cause. And this is 
the main meaning of Tennyson. 

The college is broken up first by the love of a man to 
a maid. Death stands before the Prince, but the danger 
emboldens him. 

Over rocks that are steepest 
Love vi^ill find out the way. 



178 Tennyson 

What are isolations to that overwheh-ning conqueror ! 
Love blows his trumpet, and the walls of the college fall 
down. 

Secondly, it is broken up by feminine jealousy. Ida 
neglects Lady Blanche for Psyche, a younger friend, 
one nearer her heart, and the clashing of these two 
(owing to the Princess following her affection) disinte- 
grates the college. The sketch of this little in-and-out 
of feeling is no doubt intended by Tennyson to illustrate 
a danger which does not indeed belong only to the 
woman's question. Jealousies and personal claims of 
the sort made by Lady Blanche, personal affections like 
that of the Princess which neglect some comrades and 
favour others, personal feelings of any kind pushed 
athwart the cause — with their envies, their pettiness, 
even their malignancies, their party preferences, their 
claims for office, their dwelling on small points which 
men or women make into important things in order to 
fix attention on themselves — these are the worms which 
eat into the heart of great causes and rot away the finest 
plans. Women are even more subject to these faults 
than men — not that men are naturally better, but women 
have not had that public training which men have had 
in the repression of the personal and all its stupidities. 

Thirdly, the march of events breaks up the college. 
The college has isolated itself from the general work 
of the world. Whenever a movement does that, it is 
certain to be walked over and crushed by the general 
movement. Events come knocking at its doors — and 



The Princess 179 

the gates break down under the pressure. The repre- 
sentation of this is one of the most skilful things that 
Tennyson has done in this poem. And it will never do 
for the leaders of the woman's movement to isolate it. 
It must take part in affairs other than its own, bring 
them into itself, fit itself to events and events to it — 
harmonise itself with all the forward forces round about 
it. Otherwise it will be dissolved and have to crystallise 
all over again. 

It is not only the college which is dissolved. The 
Princess herself is broken down, and at every point 
this is done by the recurrence of the natural emotions 
from which she has tried to free her heart lest they 
should weaken her will. Nature expelled returns all 
armed. Ida keeps the child of Pysche with her in the 
college — that is, she keeps with her an impulse to the 
motherhood she has abjured. She cannot give up the 
child to its mother. True sympathy with her own sex 
would not permit her to be guilty of so great a want of 
nature ; yet, along with this unnatural hardness, she 
is softened by the child's silent appeal to her woman- 
hood : 

" I took it for an hour in mine own bed 
This morning ; there the tender orphan hands 
Felt at my heart, and seem'd to charm from thence 
The wrath I nursed against the world," 

Her soul, it is plain, is now a kingdom divided against 
itself. It cannot stand. But when Cyril appeals to her 
to give it back to the mother, all the woman surges up ; 



i8o Tennyson 

she kisses it, and feels that " her heart is barren," and 
we hear in the phrase the regret of her life for the 
motherhood she has abandoned. Then she passes by 
the wounded Prince, and his old father, his beard dab- 
bled in his son's blood, points to her hair and picture on 
his heart. She thinks of his love ; and all 

Her iron will was broken in her mind, 
Her noble heart was molten in her breast. 

" Give him to me," she cries, "to tend in the palace." 
Then she finds her friend Psyche, who begs forgiveness 
for her flight from the college. At first, rapt in the child, 
she does not answer. Her brother, who has fought for 
her, cannot understand her hardness : 

" Ida — 'sdeath ! You blame the man ; 
You wrong yourselves — the woman is so hard 
Upon the woman." 

Her father cries out at her : " No heart have you." 
The father of the Prince breaks out : 

*' Woman, whom we thought woman even now, 
And were half-fool'd to let you tend our son, 
Because he might have wish'd it — but we see 
The accomplice of your madness unforgiven ; 

the rougher hand 
In safer : on to the tents ; take up the Prince." 

Step by step, natural love invades her will, love of 
children, pity for the man who loves her, love of her 
friend : 

The touch of that which kills her with herself 



The Princess i8i 



drags her from her isolation. Finally, she throws open 
the whole college in pity of the wounded and in per- 
sonal indignation with Lady Blanche. Whatever man 
lies wounded, friend or foe, 

Shall enter, if he will. Let our girls flit 
Till the storm die. 

The same action of natural love besets and conquers 
Psyche. She will not betray her brother to death, and 
forgets her oath, and she clung 

About him, and betwixt them blossom'd up 

From out a common vein of memory 

Sweet household talk and phrases of the hearth. 

Melissa does not bear that heart within her breast, 
To give three gallant gentlemen to death ; 

and all the mob of girls cry, when the hour is stormy, 
that their May is passing — that love, children, ruling of 
a house are far from them — that men hate learned 
women. Theirs is the vulgar cry, but it is forced on 
them by an isolation which denies nature. And the 
vulgarity passes away when they tend the wounded, 
when pity and tenderness are allowed full scope, when 
love is born in the college glades. Thus, the natural 
affections break down the Princess and her plan. 

This main contention in the poem is mixed up with 
a concise representation of the common prejudices of 
men concerning the work of women. Different char- 
acters represent different opinions. The father of the 



1 82 Tennyson 



Princess, King Gama, lets things slide. '* I let Ida have 
her way," he says ; " it did not matter to me. I wanted 
peace and no dispute. Let my daughter play her game." 
This indifferent, half-contemptuous treatment of the 
earnestness of women by the man, mingled with an 
irritating profession of love for them, is not unknown 
to the women of the present day. 

Then there is the rough old King, the father of the 
Prince. He is the image of the savage view come down 
to modern times. Ida's opinions of her sex and its 
work are rampant heresy to him. " Look you, sir," he 
breaks out, 

" Man is the hunter : woman is his game ; " 

and the lines which follow put this opinion with admira- 
ble bluntness. 

Cyril, bold, reckless, and honourable, the lover of the 
sex, represents another type. When he hears the wo- 
men lecture, and the Prince says " They do all this as 
well as we," 

" They hunt old trails," said Cyril, " very well : 
But when did woman ever yet invent ? " 

" What is all this learning to me ? I looked on Psyche, 
and she made me wise in another way. I learnt more 
from her in a flash than if every Muse tumbled a sci- 
ence into my empty brain. Love has come in with me 
into the college, and I have thought to roar, to break my 
chain, and shake my mane." This is the natural man, 
who thinks that love is all, who, when he loves, idealises 



The Princess 183 



the woman into the teacher of things which no knowl- 
edge can give him, but who always thinks that his man's 
strength is the natural victor over the woman. Yet, he 
it is whom Tennyson chooses to put his main conten- 
tion. Cyril loves Psyche, and begs the Princess to give 
back the child. He has no theories, no ideal of wo- 
man's future ; but he stands for Nature and for love. 

O fair and strong and terrible ! Lioness 
That with your long locks play the lion's mane ! 
But Love and Nature, these are two more terrible 
And stronger. 

These are the main male opinions about women which 
Tennyson embodied. That of the Prince remains, and 
he represents Tennyson's full thought upon the matter. 
After the battle, the Prince and the Princess are face to 
face. And the pity of his long illness, in which she has 
nursed him tenderly, " and hatred of her weakness, blent 
with shame," and sight of all the lovers in court and 
grove, and constant usage of the charities of life, and 
softening sadness, change her whole soul to gentleness 
and pity, and both at last to love. And when the Prince 
awakes to consciousness, and thinking her who sits 
beside him some sweet dream, calls her to fulfil the 
dream to perfection and kiss him ere he die, she stoops 
and kisses him, and all 

Her falser self slipt from her like a robe 
And left her woman. 

When in the night he wakes again and hears Ida read- 
ing a song that strikes the note of that which is to be 



184 Tennyson 



their life, they speak together of all that has been. 
" She was wrong," she says, " she had failed, had sought 
less for truth than power in knowledge, but something 
wild within her breast, 

A greater than all knowledge, beat her down. 

For the moment, no doubt — the moment of her pas- 
sionate yielding — she does not surrender too much. 
But she surrenders too much if she speaks as a woman 
for women. And the Prince, with all his views of pure 
equality, accepts too much of masterhood. There is a 
certain lordliness in his lecture on the woman and the 
man which belongs to Tennyson's attitude on the sub- 
ject, and which makes me dread that Ida in after years 
lost a good deal of her individuality. This might be a 
gain for the comfort of the palace, but it would be a 
loss to womanhood and to the world. But what the 
Prince says, independent of his attitude of mind, is true, 
for the most part, to the heart of the question, and 
remains true, even though fifty years have passed away. 
But we have now far more data to go upon than 
Tennyson possessed. The steady work of women dur- 
ing these fifty years, and the points they have so bravely 
won, have added element after element to our expe- 
rience. But all that has been gained has made more 
plain that 

The woman's cause is man's : they rise or sink 
Together. 

One is the equal half of the other ; and the halves are 



The Princess 185 



diverse for ever, each complements each ; both united 
in diversity make the perfect humanity ; their work 
must be together, in difference. These are the vital 
truths which Tennyson expresses in the famous lines 
of the Prince's speech, and they govern, or ought to 
govern, the whole question of the future position of 
womanhood in a better society than that in which we 
live. They do not govern the position or the life of 
womanhood at present. The prejudices both of men 
and women are against their full development. Nor 
do I think that Tennyson himself (save on a wind of 
prophecy) saw clearly to what conclusions his own views 
would lead. We could not expect he should, but men 
and women will in the end grasp with proper largeness 
of thought what this means : 

And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time 
Sit side by side, full summ'd in all their powers. 
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be, 
Self-reverent each and reverencing each. 
Distinct in individualities, 
But like each other ev'n as those who love. 

These verses assert far more for women than that they 
should find their only perfect life in marriage and in 
home ; their only exercise of sacrifice in motherhood, 
in nursing the sick, in tending on the poor, or their only 
career in personal devotion to those they love. Tenny- 
son, sometimes seeing farther, comes back to circle 
round these things of home alone ; and most men and 
women, even now, think that these exhaust all the 



86 Tennyson 



womanly work of women. It is not so. We have gained 
a wider view. To be, indeed, a true wife, such as 
Tennyson has drawn on the lips of the Prince ; or to be 
a sweet and noble mother, one 

Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants. 
No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt 
In angel instincts, breathing Paradise, 
Interpreter between the gods and men. 
Who look'd all native to her place, and yet 
On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere 
Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce 
Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved 
And girdled her with music. Happy he. 
With such a mother ! 

— to be these noble creatures at home, and to build up 
children into noble life — this, indeed, is the work of 
womanhood done not only at home, but for the State 
and for humanity at large. No higher work in the 
world exists than that of motherhood, forming children 
into true and loving men and women. 

But this does not cover all. In our complex and 
crowded society, there are thousands of women who 
have no home, who are not wives and mothers, but who 
are hungry to become themselves, to realise themselves 
in work, to live outside of themselves in the life and 
movement of the whole. These scarcely come into 
Tennyson's outlook at the end of The Princess. For 
these, the education in knowledge and the training of 
their powers to all kinds of work which Ida established 
in her college are necessary, but with a clear considera- 



The Princess 187 



tion of sexual difference. This work is, however, to be 
carried out on other principles than those which Ida 
laid down — in union with man, with as large a training 
in the just use of the emotions, in the just expansion of 
the imagination, in a true sight of the beautiful, and in 
the wise development of the ideal and the spiritual, as 
in the accurate knowledge of science and history, of law 
and literature. And then, the work of the world lies 
open to woman, to do in a different way from man, but 
with the same ends, and in the same cause — the cause 
of the happiness, the goodness, and the love of hu- 
manity. 

When that is possible — when we shall have applied to 
all the problems of society the new and as yet unused 
elements which exist in womanhood — all results will be 
reached twice as quickly as they are now reached, all 
human work will be twice as quickly done. And then, 
perhaps, some new poet will write a new Princess. 





CHAPTER VII 
IN MEMORIAM 

THE history of the writing of In Menioriam is well 
known. If an immortal fame can comfort Arthur 
Hallam, who was so soon bereft of the bright- 
ness of the earth, then he is consoled in his high 
place for the loss of human life ; for surely while the 
language of England lasts, so long will In Memoriam be 
read and Arthur Hallam be remembered. Thirty 
years ago, I made a pilgrimage to the little church near 
Clevedon, where the Hallams rest, and saw the grave- 
yard, the yews, and the marble tablet glimmering in the 
church. It was then a lonely quiet place, in a furrow 
of the sandy slopes, not a house standing near it ; and 
fifty yards from it, but hidden from view, the broad 
estuary of the Severn filled with the tide. I heard the 
water wash the feet of the low cliffs as it passed by. 
Sorrow and death, peace that passeth understanding, the 
victory of the soul, seemed present with me ; and the 
murmuring of the Severn became, as I dreamed, the 
music of eternal love, into whose vast harmonies all 

our discords are drawn at last. 

i88 



In Memoriam 189 

I felt, it seemed, the impression of the place. I 
knew afterwards that it was the impression of the poem 
that I gave to the place. And this indeed is the lasting 
power of In Memoriain. It is a song of victory and 
life arising out of defeat and death ; of peace which has 
forgotten doubt ; of joy whose mother was sorrow but 
who has turned his mother's heart into delight. The 
conquest of love — the moral triumph of the soul over the 
worst blows of fate, over the outward forces of Nature, 
even over its own ill — that is the motive of the poems 
which endure, which, like the great lighthouses, stand 
and shine through the storms of time to save and lead 
into a haven of peace the navies of humanity. We are 
flooded to-day with poems of despair, with verse which 
boasts that it describes the real when it describes the 
base, which takes the vulture's pleasure in feeding on 
the corruption of society, and prophesies, when it lifts 
its dripping beak from the offal, that to this carcass- 
complexion the whole of humanity will come at last. 
Tennyson himself has painted the class : 

We are men of ruin'd blood, 

Therefore comes it we are wise ! 

Virtue ! — to be good and just — 

Every heart, when sifted well, 
Is a clot of warmer dust, 

Mixed with cunning sparks of hell. 

The art and the temper that produce the poetry of 
despair and vileness will not last ; and it is a comfort to 
think of this when we are greatly troubled with the 



iQO Tennyson 

stenches of what they falsely call the real. The 
poetry of the soul's defeat withers in the mind of the 
race. The poet himself who writes it withers away. 
Had In Memoriam been only wailing for loss it would 
have perished, even if its work had been better than it 
is ; but since it tells of loss passing into love, since it 
describes death entering into life, it is sure to live, and 
would do so even if its work had been less excellent. 
Of course I do not mean that inartistic work, if its mo- 
tive be a victorious one, will live. I write of artists and 
their work, not of those who are not artists. The 
poetic work of those that are not artists, of whatever 
temper it be, is bound to perish. 

But In Me?noriam is a work of art, done by a man 
Avhose natural gift had been polished by study, and care- 
fully trained by steady practice till it rejoiced in its 
own power. Its subject impassioned its writer, and the 
subject was simple, close to the heart of man. As the 
poem moved on, the subject expanded, and the sorrow 
spoken of passed from the particular into the universal. 
The victory over the evil of sorrow made a similar pas- 
sage. The poet's personal conquest of pain became the 
universal conquest of the human race. This expansion 
of the subject ennobled the poem, and the triumphant 
close secured and established its nobility. It will last 
when all its detractors and their criticisms are together 
dust. 

It was published in 1850. The collected poems were 
published in 1842, The Princess in 1847 ; but the sub- 



In Memorlam 191 



ject of /// Memoriam and the writing of the poem had 
been kept in Tennyson's mind for seventeen years, from 
1833 to 1849, ripening season by season into the full and 
perfect fruit. This is the way in which Tennyson 
wrought at his natural gift, and I repeat that it was 
partly owing to this steady slowness of his that his 
poetic genius retained to so great an age its clearness, its 
power, and its fire. It was owing to this also that his 
gift gained and retained that capacity for beautiful and 
careful finish which, when the ardour of youth has 
departed from an artist, is the excellence which makes 
the work of his maturity delightful. This was in his 
character. There was that in him from his very birth 
which made him love to grow and work as slowly as an 
oak lays fibre to fibre ; as firmly, as steadily, and with as 
enduring a vitality. His patient work on lit Memoriam 
was of the very essence of the man. 

And now, how did In Memoriam arise into its form ? 

When a poet first begins to write, he writes of the 
motives which have excited his youth, and those motives 
are born out of his own life, rather than out of the life 
of the world without him. They are individual, not 
universal. His boyhood, his youth, his early loves, his 
pleasures at the university, his classic studies, the charm 
of the Greek stories ; his first delight in the romantic 
tale such as that of Arthur, his vacation rambles and the 
discussions which made them vivid ; the light fancies of 
youth, the happy pity of sad stories ; the loveliness of 
Nature round his home, and in the wilder places of the 



192 Tennyson 



mountain and the glen ; the daily life of country folk, 
seen through the emotions of youthful love ; and now 
and then such philosophy of life as belongs to the young 
man who argues round rather than pierces into the great 
problems, because they have not as yet smitten him to 
the heart — these are the motives of a poet's youth. Out 
of this experience or rather this want of experience, this 
personal play of only personal emotion over circum- 
stance and over the working of his own soul, the first 
poems of the artist are born, and they fill his heart to 
the exclusion of those greater subjects which concern 
the whole of humanity. 

The weight and trouble of the world of men, the cry 
of the questioning soul of humanity, the massive prob- 
lems of the whole race, have not yet sent their waves of 
emotion on him with sufficient force to put his individ- 
uality into the second place. There is no room for these 
outward and world-wide emotions until the personal 
emotions of youth are expressed and exhausted by ex- 
pression. But when these have been expressed (as in 
the volumes of 1830 and 1833), then the soul is, as it 
were, empty. And on this void soul, waiting for new 
thoughts and their emotions, the great trouble of man- 
kind flows in with a full tide, and brings with it univer- 
sal tidings, deeper passions, greater ranges of thought 
than the poet has known as yet. It does more ; it has a 
distinct action on the soul itself. It not only brings 
new things from without, but it also awakens within the 
poet powers of his own as yet unknown by him, as yet 



In Memoriam 193 



asleep. They are the powers by which the poet is fitted 
to deal with the great and universal questions, to answer 
which constitutes the struggle of mankind. Now and 
then they lift their head, and appear in the verse, but 
their time is not yet, and they let fall their head again 
in slumber. But now, at the inward rush of the vast 
trouble of the world of man, they spring into full life, 
and dwell in the place that personal feeling once occu- 
pied alone. The universal has come, and though the 
particular is not destroyed, it is absorbed. 

Into what shape it will first turn itself — whether it will 
gather its questions and feelings round religion, or social 
movements, or war, or womanhood, or liberty, or the 
existence of evil, or the future advent of good — will de- 
pend on circumstance. The circumstance which settled 
the first direction of Tennyson towards the universal, 
which brought the world-question into its special shape 
for him, was the death of his dearest friend. And the 
death was so tragic, and the circumstances so special, 
that it was impossible that the questions roused by it 
should be only personal. Arthur Hallam was as young 
as Tennyson ; his powers seemed so exceptional that his 
father, who was of all literary men the most sober and 
balanced in his judgments, imagined him capable of the 
greatest things. It was thought that a splendid future 
was before him, and his loss seemed to his friends to be 
a loss to all mankind. The grief of family, of all who 
loved him, came, in this fashion, to be representative of 
the sorrow of the whole world. This touched Tennyson 



194 Tennyson 



home, and depth and poignancy were given to it because 
his friend was not only a friend, but a brother artist. 
Both were poets, both worked together at poetry, both 
looked forward to a long life of art together. I do not 
remember anything like it since the death of Girtin and 
the silent sorrow of Turner ; but the parallel is a worthy 
one, it fits at almost every point. 

Thus the outward impulse came on Tennyson's soul, 
now discharged of all the gathered subjects of youth, 
relieved of the merely individual. The vast question of 
human sorrow for the loss of those who are loved, sor- 
row as infinite and as varied as love, belonging to all the 
lovers and friends of the whole world, going back with 
unremitting force through the whole of time, felt as 
keenly by those who chipped out the flake of flint as by 
Tennyson himself — this, in all its universal humanity, 
was borne in upon him now, and filled his soul. He 
felt the loss of his friend ; he felt the loss of all the 
friends of the whole world. This was Tennyson's step 
into manhood as a poet : and the slow, sustained and 
yet impassioned march by which his character forced 
him to advance, made it but natural for him to take 
seventeen years to realise and embody his progress in a 
work which is worthy of the time given to it, and which 
remains the weightiest in thought, the best in form, the 
most varied in feeHng, and the most finished of all his 
longer poems. 

Such is the psychical history of this poem, as I con- 
ceive it, and I think the poem bears out the analysis, 



in Memoriam 195 



even in its arrangement. Before, however, I speak of 
that arrangement, I wish to dwell on some characteristics 
of the poem and on some accusations made against it. 
First, it was begun immediately after the youthful poems, 
and youth lingers in it in lovely ways. When young 
Imagination rushes forward in it, he does not appear in 
his gaiety, in his youthful dress. He is solemnised 
somewhat by the subject, and wears the noble mask of 
tragedy. The rush is there, but its swiftness is stately. 
Moreover, it is quite natural that these passages of 
youthful fire and glow do not occur in the first part 
where the personal grief is recent and foremost, but in 
the second, or rather in the third, when the pain of loss 
is lessened, and the sweetness of memory and the 
soothing of faith have discharged bitterness from the 
soul. I do not know in any of the earlier poems, not 
even in Maud^ anything on a higher range of passionate 
imagination, and breathing more of youthful ardour 
weighted with dignity of thought, than a song like this ; 

LXXXVIII. 

Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, 
Rings Eden thro' the budded quicks, 
O tell me where the sensef mix, 

O tell me where the passions meet, 

Whence radiate : fierce extremes employ 

Thy spirits in the darkening leaf. 

And in the midmost heart of grief 
Thy passion clasps a secret joy : 



196 Tennyson 



And I — my harp would prelude woe — 

I cannot all command the strings ; 

The glory of the sum of things 
Will flash along the chords and go. 

Or, take this other, where the loveliness of Nature is 
met and received with joy by that receptive spirit of 
delight in a sensuous impression which a young man feels, 
and where the depth of the feeling has wrought the 
short poem into an intensity of unity ; each verse linked, 
like bell to bell in a chime, to the verse before it, and all 
swinging into a triumphant close ; swelling as they go 
from thought to thought, and finally rising from the 
landscape of earth to the landscape of infinite space — 
can anything be more impassioned and yet more solemn ? 
It has the swiftness of youth, and the nobleness of man- 
hood's sacred joy : 

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
Of evening over brake and bloom 

And meadow, slowly breathing bare 

The round of space, and rapt below 
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood, 
And shadowing down the horned flood 

In ripples, fan my brows and blow 

The fever from my cheek, and sigh 
The full new life that feeds thy breath 
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, 

111 brethren, let the fancy fly 

From belt to belt of crimson seas 

On leagues of odour streaming far, 

To where in yonder orient star 
A hundred spirits whisper " Peace." 



In Memoriam 197 



There are many other passages I might quote in this 

connection, but these are enough to prove that the 

ardour of youth is not absent from In Memoriam. Only 

one thing I add. The passion is not that of love alone, 

of personal pain or joy alone. It is felt for all humanity, 

as well as for himself — nay, his self is drowned in the 

greater emotion. It is a passion also which is not all 

feeling ; it is deepened by the universal thoughts which 

are mingled with it ; and when emotion is charged with 

thought (as the great waters are with salt), it is then 

strongest, most living, and most worthy of humanity. 

Nevertheless, the sweetness and nearness of personal 

feeling is not wanting. This is also felt as one feels it 

in youth, when tenderness rather than thoughtfulness is 

first. The loveliest example of this in the poems of 

1833 is ; 

Break, break, break. 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea. 

But the little poem which here follows is not unworthy 
of this predecessor. I do not even know whether its 
note is not more delicate and tender ; the wash of the 
Severn in it is more homelike, more near to the human- 
ity of sorrow than the desolate dash of the sea. 

The Danube to the Severn gave 

The darken'd heart that beat no more ; 
They laid him by the pleasant shore, 

And in the hearing of the wave. 

There twice a day the Severn fills ; 
The salt sea-water passes by, 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 

And makes a silence in the hills. 



198 Tennyson 



The Wye is hush'd nor moves along, 
And hush'd my deepest grief of all, 
When fill'd with tears that cannot fall, 

I brim with sorrow drowning song. 

The tide flows down, the wave again 

Is vocal in its wooded walls ; 

My deeper anguish also falls, 
And I can speak a little then. 

That is the full pathos of personal sorrow. There is 
nothing universal in it. It is all youth — and yet how 
finished is its art ! How delicately the work of Nature 
without is woven together with the labour of pain 
within, and how unforgetful is the reader kept, as the 
verse goes on, of the place where the poet stands, of the 
grave in which Arthur lies ! 

Connected with this last, and indeed a part of it which 
I desire to isolate, is the next point. An objection sim- 
ilar to that made to Lyctdas, is made to Iti Memoriam. 
As in Lycidas the grief is lost, as some say, in conven- 
tional ornament, or, as others say, in the mere making of 
a poem, so the grief in In Memoriam is lost, we are told, 
in theology and philosophy. There is some apparent 
truth in the objection. But first and foremost, the grief 
is not lost. It appears, as it does not appear in Lycidas, 
Secondly, we must remember that the poem is the tale 
of two years and a half, and that the sorrow for his 
friend passes through this period, and changes its 
form as time changes all our sorrows. It is full, 
close, and even over-sentimental in expression at 
the beginning. It is mingled, in the middle of 



In M 



emoriam 



199 



the poem, with the doubts that its suffering brings. 
It passes into peace and victory at the close. But it is 
never lost, and it becomes more true to human nature, 
more gentle, as the poem develops. There are few lyri- 
cal movements lovelier and tenderer than the great can- 
zone where Tennyson describes his reading late at night 
the letters of the dead, and the waking vision of thought, 
when his soul, touched by his friend's power from the 
other world, is borne with him into the universe of spirit. 
That is the voice of true love, infinitely tender, and, 
while regretful, moved by a nobler friendship than had 
been of old on earth ; and every one who has loved and 
lost, and has not yielded to the selfishness of grief, knows 
that such an hour is deeper, and more tender than tongue 
can tell. Moreover, we must also remember that the 
subject has passed, beyond his sorrow for his friend, 
into consideration of the sorrow of the whole world ; 
and the universality of the emotion felt increases the 
intensity of it. We can trace its growth. The 
first part of the poem which belongs only to his 
particular sorrow for Arthur is weak in comparison 
with the last. Yet, when he comes to think of the 
universal sorrow, it is knit up still with his friend, 
and the triumph of the whole is also the triumph of his 
friend. When we compare even that fine passage I have 
quoted, " The Danube to the Severn gave," with this — 
" Dear friend, far off, my lost desire " — which now I quote, 
what a change ! what a difference in the depth and 
strength of the feeling! The feeling is still personal, 



200 Tennyson 



but it is also universal. The love which fills it is not 
less because it mingles the whole universe with his 
friend. Nay, it is greater, for the love of the whole 
world, of God and Nature and man, and the joy of love's 
victory have been added to it : 

cxxix. 

Dear friend, far off, my lost desire, 
So far, so near in woe and weal ; 

loved the most, when most I feel 
There is a lower and a higher ; 

Known and unknown ; human, divine ; 

Sweet human hand and lips and eye ; 

Dear heavenly friend that canst not die, 
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine. 

Strange friend, past, present, and to be ; 

Loved deeplier, darklier understood ; 

Behold, I dream a dream of good, 
And mingle all the world with thee. 

cxxx. 

Thy voice is on the rolling air ; 

1 hear thee where the waters run ; 
Thou standest in the rising sun, 

And in the setting thou art fair. 

What art thou then ? I cannot guess ; 
But though I seem in star and flower 
To feel thee some diffusive power, 

I do not therefore love thee less : 

Thy love involves the love before ; 

My love is vaster passion now ; 

Tho' mix d with God and Nature thou, 
I seem to love thee more and more . 



In Memoriam 201 



Far off thou art, but ever nigh ; 

I have thee still, and I rejoice ; 

I prosper, circled with thy voice ; 
I shall not lose thee tho' I die. 



That is one form of the fervent feeling of Tennyson, 
and it is worth a hundredfold more than our merely 
personal sorrows, joys, and loves. The deep and ardent 
emotion which is awakened by the mightiest and best 
thoughts, gathering round the great and noble realities 
which belong to all mankind, and stir eternal yearning 
and high desire in the heart of man, is worthier to feel, 
and nobler to celebrate in song, than the fleeting ar- 
dours of youth which are concerned with ourselves 
alone, and which imprison us in ourselves. 

It has been said that Tennyson fails in passion, and 
when men say that, they mean the embodiment of 
the passion of love in verse. It is true that he is not 
capable of describing the wilder, the more sensuous 
phases of love. The only poem in which he ever tried 
it is one called Fati?na^ and it is a great failure. But 
to say that he is incapable of describing the ardent love 
of a man for a maid is to forget Matid^ and Maud does not 
stand alone. Nevertheless, his intenser singing belongs 
to other spheres. The personal loves of earth fade and 
die, unless they are taken up into wider and higher 
loves, unless they are expanded to fit into the love of 
man and the love of God. And Tennyson always, 
or almost always, lifts them into those loftier regions. 
This is the full drift of In Memoriam, 



202 Tennyson 



Moreover, as age grows on us, and youthful ardours 
fade, love, which was once engaged with persons, and 
which, in loving persons, learned to know itself and 
its powers, is content no longer with persons. It 
desires to expand, it prunes its wings for a larger flight 
into regions where self-desire is lost. It loves a coun- 
try and can die for its honour. It loves the great 
causes which set forward mankind, and in such devo- 
tion it loves the whole race of man. It loves Nature, 
not in parts as once in youth, not because it is made to 
reflect our feelings, but as a whole and for itself alone. 
It loves the great ideas — truth, justice, honour, purity, 
uprightness, the liberty and duties of man, the union 
of all mankind in spirit and in truth. It loves, finally, 
God, in whom all Nature and man are contained and 
loved, in whom all the great ideas and truths are em- 
bodied, from whom they flow and to whom they return, 
bringing with them the men and women to whom they 
have been given. It loves, thus, the whole universe. 
And the emotion which these vaster loves awaken is 
deeper, stronger, and m.ore noble than that which is 
stirred by the personal loves of youth. It is enduring ; 
it is coeval with God Himself ; and man only reaches 
his true destiny when he is thrilled through and through 
with its powers. These are the loves which Tennyson, 
more than any other poet of this century, felt and sang. 
For these he wrote with a greater depth of feeling than 
other men. It is in celebrating these diviner forms of 
love, as I might show in poem after poem, that he writes 



In Memoriam 



203 



with the greatest glow and fire ; and it is for this that 
humanity, as it grows into capacity for the more immor- 
tal affections, will always honour him. This, too, was 
in his character. It was one of the roots of the man. 
The tendency, the conduct, the upbuilding, the power, 
and the life of his poetry find in this their best expla- 
nation ; nor is there any better example than I71 Memo- 
riam of this expansion of love from the particular to 
the universal, or of the profound ardour with which he 
made its song. 

It remains to say something of the manner in which 
Tennyson uses and. describes Nature in In Memoriam. 
The scenery of the poem is partly of the downs and of the 
sea in the distance ; partly of a woodland country made 
vocal by a brook ; and sometimes of a garden full of 
flowers and a lawn with far-branching trees, elm, beech, 
and sycamore. Two parts of England contribute their 
landscape to the verse, for in the midst of the poem 
Tennyson changes his dwelling-place ; but the scenery 
of the first part is often recollected and described in the 
second. 

Nature is used in diverse ways. Sometimes the land- 
scape is taken up by the poet into his own being spirit- 
ualised therein, and made by stress of passion to image 
the movement of his inner life. Then the outward 
scene and the inward feeling are woven together moment 
by moment with an intensity which makes them one. 
And this is done in an accumulative fashion. Vision 



204 Tennyson 



after vision of Nature, each of a greater beauty and 
sentiment than its predecessor, succeed one another, and 
each of them is fitted to a corresponding exaltation of 
the emotions of the soul. There is no better example 
of this method than the song I have elsewhere quoted : 

Sweet after showers, ambrosial air. 

Nor is the conclusion of xcv. — that full-throated pas- 
sage about the growing dawn and the rising wind — in- 
ferior in this intense clasping together of Nature and 
the soul, or in this accumulating power. Another 
example of the same method is to be found in the 
Hesper-Phosphor poem (cxxi.). This, the form of which 
is different from the other examples of the same method, 
'is the most finished piece of conscious art in In Memo- 
riam. Two general aspects of Nature under the same 
star — the evening and the morning star — are taken to 
represent the two positions of his soul, in the past and 
in the present. Both these aspects are made alive by 
the simple doings of human life that naturally belong to 
the waking of the world from rest, and the going of the 
world to rest. Then both, since Hesper and Phosphor 
are the same, since the morning brings the evening in 
its arms, since the evening bears within it the waking of 
the dawn, are smitten together, like his past and present, 
into one. 

Another method describes at some length a single 
aspect of Nature, and then at the end throws back on 
this special aspect the mood of his mind. In these 



In Memoriam 205 

poems we have the finest descriptions of Nature in In 
Memoriam ; and frequently in two adjacent poems two 
opposed moods of Nature are represented in contrast 
one with another. The calm of the whole world in the 
morning hour (xi.) is set over against the tempest which 
the evening has brought upon the same landscape (xv.). 
They image his calm despair and wild unrest, and per- 
haps created them ; for Nature often makes our passions 
and then mirrors them. 

No calm was ever deeper in verse than it is on that 
high wold in the morning, and no storm wilder than it is 
on the same wold in the evening ; and Tennyson takes 
the greatest pains to describe the vastness of the out- 
spread landscape, under both these moods of Nature. 
In the first he sees the moor at his feet, the dews on the 
furze, the gossamers that tremble not, so still is the air, 
but which twinkle in the lifting light of morning. Then 
he raises his eyes, and that far landscape to which 
Shelley or Wordsworth would have allotted twenty or 
thirty lines, is done in four : 

Calm and still light on yon great plain 
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, 
And crowded farms and lessening towers, 

To mingle with the bounding main. " 

This is Tennyson's concentrated manner, and the 
landscape seems all the larger from the previous de- 
scription of the small space of ground on which he is 
standing. I do not say that it is better than the expan- 
sive landscapes of Shelley or Wordsworth, but it is done 



2o6 Tennyson 



in a different way, and with its own distinct emotion. 
We may set beside it another description of calm in the 
epilogue v/here the landscape is equally far and vast — a 
moonlight vision alive with streaming cloud and with 
the moving of the moon all the night long — a most beau- 
tiful thing, drenched with the silent loveliness of the 
universe. 

Dumb is that tower that spake so loud, 
And high in heaven the streaming cloud, 
And on the downs a rising fire : 

And rise, O moon, from yonder down. 

Till over down and over dale 

All night the shining vapour sail 
And pass the silent-lighted town. 

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills, 
And catch at every mountain head. 
And o'er the friths that branch and spread 

Their sleeping silver through the hills. 

The landscape is as far as it is fair, and it is immedi- 
ately taken up, in accordance with the first method of 
which I have spoken, into his own soul, into his blessing 
on the bridal pair ; and then inwoven with the com- 
ing child, and with the race of man. We might now 
think that this poet of wide distances would not be able 
to picture the quiet of a narrow and enclosed space ; of 
a lawn and garden on a summer evening. But he does 
this with equal force and beauty. The poem (xcv.) 
beginning — 



In Memoriam 207 



By night we linger'd on the lawn, 

breathes with the peace of all the country-homes of Eng- 
land, and, even more, with the happy stillness of human 
hearts, of one another sure. 

The storms described in I71 Me?nortam are done in the 
same way as these images of calm. The tempest of the 
fifteenth section begins with what is close at hand — the 
wood by which he stands at sunset — 

The last red leaf is whid'd away, 
The rooks are blov/n about the skies. 

And then, after that last admirable line which fills the 
whole sky with the gale, he lifts his eyes, as before, and 
we see with him the whole world below, painted also in 
four lines — the forest, the waters, the meadows, struck 
out, each in one word ; and the wildness of the wind 
and the width of the landscape given, as Turner would 
have given them, by the low shaft of storm-shaken sun- 
light dashed from the west right across to the east — 

The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd, 

The cattle huddled on the lea ; 

And Mdldly dash'd on tower and tree 
The sunbeam strikes along the world. 

Lastly, to heighten the impression of tempest, to show 
the power it will have when the night is come, to add a 
far horizon to the solemn world — he paints the rising 
wrath of the storm in the cloud above the ocean rim, all 
aflame with warlike sunset, 



2o8 Tennyson 



That rises upwards always higher. 
And onward drags a labouring ;ast, 
And topples round the dreary west, 

A looming bastion fringed with fire. 



It is well done, but whosoever reads the whole will feel 
that the storm of the human heart is higher than the 
storm of Nature. 

Tennyson always loved tempestuous days, and this 
general description of storm is followed by many others 
of fierce weather. In Ixxii. the whole of the day is wild, 
but here he dv/ells on the small and particular effects 
caused by the wind. The blasts " blow the poplar 
white " ; the " rose pulls sideways " ; the daisy " closes 
her crimsom fringes to the shower " ; the " burthened 
brows " of the day — that is, the looming clouds — pour 
forth winds 



That whirl the ungarner'd sheaf afar. 
And sow the sky with flying boughs. 



Nor is the winter gale and the wintry world neglected. 
Stanza cvii. opens with the sunset and the " purple-frosty 
bank of vapour " on the horizon, and then the north-east 
wind comes with the night. Its fierceness, keenness, 
iron-heartedness, its savage noise, the merciless weather 
of it, pass from the woods out to the sea, and the moon 
hangs hard-edged over the passing squalls of snow. The 
use of rough vowels, of words that hiss and clang, and 
smite the ear, heightens the impression. 



In Memoriam 209 



Fiercely flies 
The blast of North and East, and ice 
Makes daggers at the sharpen'd eaves, 

And bristles all the brakes and thorns 
To yon hard crescent, as she hangs 
Above the wood which grides and clangs 

Its leafless ribs and iron horns 

Together, in the drifts that pass 
To darken on the rolling brine 
That breaks the coast. 



The hand that wrought this winter landscape is equally- 
cunning in summer and spring. The summer garden 
and the summer lawn of Ixxxix. are steeped in heat and 
light. The lines " Immantled in ambrosial dark," 
" The landscape winking thro' the heat," hold in them 
alike the shade and blaze of summer days ; and the 
joyous sound of the scythe in early morn is full of the 
sentiment of summer — 

O sound to rout the brood of cares, 
The sweep of scythe in morning dew, 
The gust that round the garden flew, 

And tumbled half the mellowing pears ! 

I give one more example for the brief perfection of the 
picture : 

When summer's hourly-mellowing change 
May breathe, with many roses sweet, 
Upon the thousand waves of wheat 

That ripple round the lonely grange. 



^lo Tennyson 



As to spring, the poem is full of its wakeful charm, 
of its glad beginnings, " when flower is feeling after 
flower." The rosy plumelets that tuft the larch, the 
native hazels tassel-hung, the living smoke of the yew, 
the little speedwell's darling blue, the laburnum's 
dropping-wells of fire, the sea-blue bird of March flitting 
underneath the barren bush, the low love-language of 
the dove, the rare piping of the mounted thrush, are all 
phrases which tell how closely he watched her wakening ; 
and when his heart is happy at the end of his poem, he 
breaks into one of the loveliest songs of spring that Eng- 
lish poetry has ever made. 



cxv. 



Now fades the last long streak of snow, 
Now burgeons every maze of quick 
About the flowering squares, and thick 

By ashen roots the violets blow. 



I need not quote the rest, but it is lovely throughout. 
Almost all the joys of spring, her scenery and its in- 
dwellers, her earth, and sky, and sea, and at last the 
springtide of his own heart, are vocal in its feeling and 
its art. 

Finally, there is the landscape of memory — another 
method of description, in which many happy and 
different aspects of Nature are gathered together, some 
described in two lines, some even flashed forth in half a 
line, and every one of them humanised by tender feeling 



In Memoriam 21 1 

— that feeling through recollection of Nature and his 
friend together which makes for every landscape its own 
ethereal atmosphere, half of soft air and half of soft 
emotion. Of this kind of natural description, so difficult, 
so rarely done well, so exquisite when it is at the same 
time brief and full, the two poems c. and ci. are most 
lovely and delicate examples, and every one who cares 
for poetry should possess them in his soul. Many also 
are the scattered phrases about the natural world which 
might be collected for their subtle simplicity, beauty, 
and truth ; but I close this praise of the poet with only 
one, in which man and Nature are inwoven, and the 
way he wrote his poem enshrined : 

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
Their wings in tears, and skim away. 




CHAPTER VIII 

IN MEMORIAM {Continued) 
ITS STRUCTURE 

THE question of this Chapter is — How was In Me- 
moriai)i shaped ? What is the conduct of the 
poem ? 
It was shaped into the continuous story of two years 
and a half ; not a story of events but the story of the 
voyage of a soul. First, the hurricane of sorrow came ; 
then the fierceness of the storm grew less, but left the 
sea tormented and the ship of the soul tossing from 
wave to wave, from question to question. At last there 
was calm, and the soul rested ; and then a clear wind 
arose in sunny skies, and the ship flew forward, all the 
sails set to victory, into a harbour of peace. But better 
words than these to describe the history of In Memoriam 
are those of the Psalm, said of those who go down into 
the deep : " They go up to the heavens, and down again 
to the depth ; their soul melteth away for very trouble. 
They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man, 
and are at their wits' end. So they cry unto the Lord 

212 



In Memoriam 213 

in their trouble, and He delivereth them out of their dis- 
tress. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves 
thereof are still. Then are they glad because they are 
at rest : so He bringeth them to the haven where they 
would be." 

The time of this story is well marked, and it is the first 
thing its reader should understand. It outlines the map 
of the poem. It begins in September, 1833, when Tenny- 
son hears of his friend's death at Vienna. It is autumn ; 
the leaves are reddening to their fall, the chestnut is 
pattering to the ground, as the poet waits for the body 
of his friend. This autumn closes with a great storm : 

To-night the winds begin to rise, 
And roar from yonder dripping day, 
The last red leaf is whirl'd away, 

The rooks are blown about the skies. 

Then the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth 
sections describe the first Christmas after the death of 
Arthur. In the thirty-eighth, the spring of 1834 has 
come, and in the forty-eighth the swallows are flying 
over the waters. The seventy-second records the anni- 
versary of his friend's death, September, 1834. One 
year has passed by. 

The Christmas of 1834 is recorded in the seventy- 
eighth, and the spring of 1835 arrives in the eighty-third 
sections. Full summer is with us in the eighty-ninth and 
the ninety-fifth ; and in the ninety-ninth the day of his 
friend's death dawns after storm in balm and peace. A 
second year has gone by, September, 1835. 



214 Tennyson 

Another Christmas comes with the hundred and third 
section, and at the hundred and fourteenth these notes 
of time close with the April of 1836. The poem lasts, 
then, just two years and seven months. The epithala- 
mium at the end, the celebration of his sister's marriage- 
day, belongs to 1842 ; and the prologue to the poem was 
written last of all, and is dated 1849. 

And now, to illustrate the progress of the soul from 
sorrow to peace, I will take the three main marks of 
time : the anniversaries of the death of his friend, the 
Christmastides, the advents of spring, and dwell on the 
changes of mind displayed in the record of them. When 
Tennyson hears of Arthur's death (to take the death- 
days first) grief is all ; it drowns the world ; Nature 
seems purposeless, " a hollow form with empty hands " ; 
the sullen, changeless yew-tree symbolises the hardness 
of his heart. When the anniversary of the death comes 
the memory of it is still miserable. That hour 

sicken'd every living bloom 
And blurr'd the splendour of the sun. 

It was a 

Day mark'd as with some hideous crime, 
When the dark hand struck down thro' time 
And cancell'd nature's best — 

a day " to hide its shame beneath the ground." Thus 
even when a year has gone by the wrathfulness of sorrow 
is still deep. As yet there is no forgiveness of pain and 
no peace (Ixxii.). 



In Memoriam 215 



When the next anniversary dawns (xcix.) the tone is 
changed ; the birds are singing, the meadows breathe 
softly of the past, the woodlands are holy to the dead ; 
there has been storm, but the breath of the day is now 
balmy, and the swollen brook murmurs a song ** that 
slights the coming care." But the greatest change is 
that he thinks less of his own pain and more of the pain, 
of mankind. The dim, sweet dawn awakens to myriads 
on the earth memories of death, and he feels that he is 
the comrade of all these mourners : 

O wheresoever those may be, 
Betwixt the slumber of the poles. 
To-day they count as kindred souls ; 

They know me not, but mourn with me. 

This is the progress at these spaces of time. But if we 
wish to test it in a better way, we should choose, not the 
anniversaries of death when the poet is sure to have his 
sorrow driven home to him, but other times when the 
mind is freed from so close a pressure of memory. I 
take now the three Christmas Days. 

When the bells of the first Christmas Eve (xxviii.) 
ring out peace and goodwill, he remembers that he had 
almost wished to die in his grief before he heard them, 
but they control his spirit with a touch of joy ; and 
though he scarce dare keep his Christmas Eve, so 
deep is regret, yet let me give, he cries, their due to 
ancient use and custom, though they too die. But this 
bitterness perishes next day. He keeps his Christmas 
and remembers his friend who was with him the year 



2i6 Tennyson 



before. A gentler feeling creeps into his heart. The 
dead rest, he says, their sleep is sweet ; and then the 
first prophecy in the poem of the resurrection of the 
soul from the sorrow of loss is made, and the verse lifts 
to the thought : 

Our voices took a higher range ; 

Once more we sang — " They do not die 

Nor lose their mortal sympathy 
Nor change to us, although they change ; 

•' Rapt from the fickle and the frail 
With gather'd power, yet the same, 
Pierces the keen seraphic flame 
From orb to orb, from veil to veil." 

Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, 
Draw forth the cheerful day from night ; 
O father, touch the east, and light 

The light that shone when Hope was born. 

A year passes, another Christmas comes (Ixxviii.). 
The snow was silent, the day was calm, and the sense of 
something for ever gone brooded over all Nature ; but 
this sense of loss was no longer stormy with passion of 
grief but quiet like the day. They played, he says, their 
ancient games, but none showed one token of distress ; 
no tears fell. " O," he cries, 

O last regret, regret can die ! 

No — mixt with all this mystic frame, 
Her deep relations are the same, 

But with long use her tears are dry. 

This is not victory, and the grief is still only personal. 
The poet has not escaped from himself, and the year, 



In Memoriam 



217 



which has been spent in a half-intellectual analysis of 
doubts and the replies of the understanding to them, has 
not brought peace to the life of the soul. 

Everything is changed at the next Christmas (civ.-cvi.). 
He hears the bells again, but he has left the old home for 
another ; and the change of place has broken, like the 
growth of time, the bond of dying use. He holds the 
night of Christmas Eve solemn to the past, but as it falls, 
he feels that the merely personal is no more. He sees 
the stars rise, and the thought of the great course of 
time moving on to good for all the world, of the sum- 
mer of mankind that sleeps in the winter seeds, enters 
his heart. The universal has come. 

No dance, no motion, save alone 
What lightens in the lucid east 

Of rising worlds by yonder wood. 

Long sleeps the summer in the seed ; 

Run out your measured arcs, and lead 
The closing cycle rich in good. 

The full significance of this great change of temper 
is seen in the next song, which celebrates the incoming 
of the new year : 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky ; 

a poem all men know. It bids the past die, and the 
present and future live. The sound of the bells is 
happy ; they ring out all evil, and ring in all good. 
They ring out the grief that sapped his mind ; they 



2i8 Tennyson 



ring out his mournful rhymes, but they ring in the 
fuller minstrel who sings of the world that is to be, 
of the Christ who comes again. The personal has 
wholly perished. His heart is full of all mankind. His 
own victory over sorrow has taught him the victory 
over sorrow that awaits the race, and the triumph of the 
hour sounds nobly in the noble verse. 

Once more, take the coming of the three springtides. 
There is some soothing thought in the verses that describe 
the spring of 1834 (xxxviii.). Six months have passed 
since Arthur's death, and he thinks that his friend may 
know that he has sung of his goodness. Yet though he 
has some comfort, he has no delight : 

No joy the blowing season gives, 

The herald melodies of spring, 

But in the songs I love to sing 
A doubtful gleam of solace lives. 

When, however, the spring of 1835 arrives (Ixxxiii.) 
his temper is no longer retrospective. Sorrow is with 
him still, but he prophesies a new time, when his heart 
will be filled with the joy of a spiritual spring, and his 
soul sing of its resurrection. " O sweet new year, why 
dost thou linger, what trouble can live in April days ? " 

Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire. 
The little speedwell's darling blue, 
Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew, 

Laburnums, dropping- wells of fire. 

O thou, new-year, delaying long, 

Delayest the sorrow in my blood, 

That longs to burst a frozen bud 
And flood a fresher throat with song. 



In Memoriam 



219 



And then, last of all, in the spring of 1836 (cxv., cxvi.) 
regret has wholly died. The re-orient life of the world 
is the symbol of the departure of the wintry grief that 
looks back to a friendship that seemed lost, and symbol 
also of the gain of the new friendship that is to be. His 
friend's face shines on him while he muses alone ; the 
dear voice speaks to him. " O days and hours," he 
cries, " your work is this " — 

To hold me from my proper place, 
A little while from his embrace, 
For fuller gain of after bliss ; 

That out of distance might ensue 

Desire of nearness doubly sweet ; 

And unto meeting, when we meet, 
Delight a hundredfold accrue. 

These contrasts are enough to mark out clearly, not 
only that In Memoriam is the history of a soul 
continued from point to point of change during nearly 
three years, but also that it is the history of a soul in 
progress from darkness to light, from the selfishness to 
the unselfishness of sorrow ; from despair of God and 
man to faith in both ; and, as a personal matter, from 
the thought that friendship was utterly lost in death 
to the thought that friendship was gained through 
death at a higher level of love and with a deeper 
union. 

I will sketch this progress also. The first part of the 
poem is entirely personal to himself and his friend. It 



220 Tennyson 

records the several phases of sorrow — sullen hopeless- 
ness, wild unrest, calm despair, tender tears, the woes 
of memory and association. The end of this period 
comes in the hidden hope which arises on Christmas 
Day, and which is followed by those lovely verses about 
Lazarus and Mary (xxxi., ii.), in which the hope of the 
life to come and the peace of love begin to dawn upon 
his heart. Then follows that transition time which 
interests the most those who care for intellectual analy- 
sis. It interests me therefore the least of all. It is the 
least poetical, the least imaginative, the least instinct 
with beauty and feeling. And Tennyson, while he 
records the various movements of his mind in it, does 
not himself think much of them, when he escapes from 
them. During this passage of thinking, which lasts 
about a year and a half, various arguments concerning 
immortality, for and against, are put, and answers at- 
tempted to them : mood after mood of the questioning 
soul is represented, some bright, some dark, half doubt, 
half faith ; some of wonder whether the living shall 
have life, others of wonder if the dead be alive ; and, 
if so, of what kind is their life, and whether it touches 
ours at all, — a long period of argumentative question- 
ing, useless for any conclusion, but useful so far that the 
soul sees at last that the problem of sorrow and of the 
future life cannot be personally solved in the realm of 
argument. Then comes the crisis, and the end of all 
the thought, of all the doubt — so far as he has gone — in 
that long and famous stanza (Ixxxv.) beginning : 



In Memoriam 221 



This truth came borne with bier and pall, 

I felt it when I sorrow'd most ; 

'T is better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all. 

It gathers together all that has past. It establishes 
his belief that his friend is alive, and that his 
friend's being is working in his own ; that there- 
fore he has now sufficient comfort to live again in 
other men, to remember the mighty hopes that make 
us men. It is the beginning of a new departure, and 
is followed at once by the lovely verses, ** Sweet 
after showers, ambrosial air," in which all Nature 
leads to heavenly peace. Then through recalling 
what his friend was, he wishes to see him as he is. 
"Come back to me," he cries, "come as thou art," 
and he begins to realise that the dead belong to 
our life, till (xcv.) the splendour of that truth is 
borne in upon him, and Tennyson gives his full 
power to its expression. This is a sun-risen piece 
of work — the evening, and the summer calm upon 
the lawn, the night when he is left alone, the hunger 
at his heart for union, the reading of the letters, 
and at last the passionate intermingling with the living 
soul of the dead in waking trance ; the momen- 
tary doubt when the exaltation died, and then the 
prophecy of the victory, of light and life at hand for 
him in the coming of the dawn. Here is the passage ; 
it is the embodiment of the second crisis in this history 
of the soul : 



222 Tennyson 



So word by word, and line by line. 

The dead man touch'd me from the past, 
And all at once it seem'd at last 

The living soul was flash'd on mine. 

And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd 
About empyreal heights of thought, 
And came on that which is, and caught 

The deep pulsations of the Avorld, 

iEonian music measuring out 

The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance — 
The blows of Death. At length, my trance 

Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt. 

Vague words ! but ah, how hard to frame 
In matter-moulded forms of speech. 
Or ev'n for intellect to reach 

Thro* memory that which I became : 

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd 

The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease, 
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees 

Laid their dark arms about the field : 

And suck'd from out the distant gloom 

A breeze began to tremble o'er 

The large leaves of the sycamore, 
And fluctuate all the still perfume. 

And gathering freshlier overhead, 

Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung 
The heavy-folded rose, and flung 

The lilies to and fro, and said 

' The dawn, the dawn," and died away ; 
And East and West, without a breath, 
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death. 
To broaden into boundless day. 



In Memoriam 22 



Thus the " spectres of the mind " are laid. In- 
deed, these questionings of the understanding on sub- 
jects beyond its powers, and over which men and 
women worry themselves into a prolonged infancy of 
restlessness or a senility of pride, are mere phantasms 
which the intellect creates in its vanity with which to 
trouble love. There are only two ways of getting rid 
of them — one is the way that Tennyson pictures in his 
own fashion in the rest of In Memoriain — the way of 
love and of faith following on love — and all may read 
it there, expressed in pure art, and in a series of short 
poems which are as lovely in form as they are in 
feeling, as full of the higher human passion as they 
are of an exquisite sentiment for tTie beauty of Na- 
ture, and so closely knit together by spiritual joy that 
they — rising incessantly from point to point of universal 
love — form a single poem. It is the triumphal march 
of Love. It is also a triumph of art. 

The other way of getting rid of these questionings 
of the understanding concerning those things which it 
never can prove is to entirely empty the mind of them, 
abandon all care for anything beyond this present world. 
It is a way many take, and it has its advantages. It sets 
the mind free to give itself wholly to the practical busi- 
ness, as it is called, of life. But it has also a disad- 
vantage which may be excessively unpractical. It leaves 
the soul empty of the ideas which carry a man and 
his work beyond this world, and which link all the 
history and end of mankind to a wider history, and to 



2 24 Tennyson 



an eternal life. It leaves personal love forlorn, and 
human love for all men in the arms of death. The his- 
tory of the universal love of man is made by it a history 
of universal death. 

Many persons stand that easily. It does not trouble 
them, but I do not know any poet, even the most de- 
spairing, who does not at times soar above it or regret 
it. At least, Tennyson could not endure it, and he was 
never satisfied till he had left it behind him. " Power 
was with me," he cries, ^' in the night " ; and in the rush 
of love by which he clasped to his spirit the living 
being of his dead friend, faith in life filled his heart. *' I 
cannot understand," he said, " but I love." This in the 
beginning of his victory ; and as love creates life and 
joy wheresoever it moves, all things change now to the 
poet. The whole of Nature breathes and thrills of his 
friend ; every memory of him, while they walked amidst 
her beauty, is happy. 

No gray old grange, or lonely fold, 
Or low morass and whispering reed. 
Or simple stile from mead to mead, 

Or sheep-walk up the windy wold ; 

Nor hoary knoll of ash or haw 
That hears the latest linnet trill, 
Nor quarry trench'd along the hill. 

And haunted by the wrangling daw ; 

Nor runlet trickling from the rock ; 
Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves 
To left and right thro' meadowy curves, 

That feed the mothers of the flock ; 



In Memoriam 225 



But each has pleased a kindred eye, 
And each reflects a kindlier day ; 
And leaving these, to pass away, 

I think once more he seems to die. 



All humanity -also opens before him, filled with hopes 
that will not shame themselves. It is here that " Ring 
out wild bells" comes into the poem, "Ring out the 
thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of 
peace " ; and with this universal hope, impulse to make 
his sorrow into love for man deepens his heart. " I will 
not shut me from my kind," he sings, " nor feed with 
sighs the passing wind." Then, that he may know how 
he ought to live for man, he draws, in a succession of 
short poems, the picture of his friend's character and of 
how he would have lived for the race. And out of it all 
arises this — That knowledge is needed to save the world 
from its outward and inward pain, but that knowledge is 
not enough. Wisdom, such as Arthur had, must be 
added to knowledge, and must rule it ; and wisdom is of 
things that Love knows, but that knowledge cannot 
know. " Come then, my friend, enter into me ; quicken 
me with this wisdom of thine ; let love be all in all in 
me. I could not find God alive, nor my friend, in the 
questionings of the understanding, but now I love and I 
have found them both — found God, and my friend in 
God. And with them I have found life, life for myself 
and life for all my brother men. I see the progress of 
the world as I have seen my own progress ; I see the 
working of love in the evolution of mankind ; I see our- 



226 Tennyson 

selves labouring on, and our labour useful and lovely 
when it is for others ; and, lastly, I see the great labour 
of God's love underlying all and moving to a perfect 



close." 



And all, as in some piece of art, 
Is toil co-operant to an end. 

And the conclusion that sums the whole is a solemn 
prayer to God that all the world may conquer, as he 
has conquered, the besieging years, and the powers of 
sorrow. 

O living will, that shalt endure 

When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
Rise in the spiritual rock, 

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure, 

That we may lift from out the dust 

A voice as unto him that hears, 

A cry above the conquer'd years 
To one that with us works, and trust. 

With faith that comes of self-control, 
The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved, 

And all we flow from, soul in soul. 

Nine years after Arthur Hallam's death, Tennyson's 
sister was married, and he writes her marriage song as 
the epilogue to his poem. We see then what was his 
temper of mind in 1842. Had he gone back, had he 
lost the fruits of the victory he had won ? Love is not 
less, he says, but more. It is solid-set like a statue ; it 



In Memoriam 227 

is moulded into calm of soul, all passion spent, and he 
has himself grown into something greater than before ; 
so that his songs of dead regret seem " echoes out of 
weaker times." It is not that he loves his friend less, 
but that his friend is with him so closely, in so vivid a 
life and with so great a power — being as it were a part 
of God and of the life of God in him — that only joy 
remains. 

Even as he sits at the wedding-feast, he feels Arthur 
with them, wishing joy. And then, as before, he passes 
from the personal, from the peace of home and its shel- 
ter, to think of the greater world of man, of the nobler 
race which God is making out of ours. He retires when 
night falls, and looks out on the skies as the moon rises. 
" Touch with thy shade and splendour," he cries, the 
bridal doors ; let a soul from their marriage draw from 
out the vast, and strike his being into bounds, and be a 
closer link betwixt us and the crowning race, the higher 
humanity to be, of which my friend (and he sweeps 
back, enamoured of unity like a poet, to the first subject 
of In Memorimti) was a noble type — the race to the 
making of which God is moving forward the whole crea- 
tion. Thus he ends with the universal, with the reitera- 
tion of the victory of man over pain in the eternity of 
the love of God : 



That God, which ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves. 



228 Tennyson 



Seven years then passed by, during which Tennyson 
still revised his poem, during which his spirit was con- 
tinually kept close to the conclusions of faith and hope 
and love, and of love the greatest of these three, to 
which he had come in /?/ Memoriam. How would he 
feel towards these when so long a term of years had 
come to an end ? We have an answer to that question 
in the prologue to the poem written in 1849. Every 
conclusion he had come to is confirmed and re-expressed 
in that profound and religious psalm. All that he loved, 
hoped for, and believed, is there laid in the hands, held 
in the grace, and enshrined in the spirit of Him who is 
" Immortal Love." 




CHAPTER IX 

" MAUD " AND THE WAR-POEMS 

THE main point concerning Tennyson himself on 
which I dwelt in the last chapter was that he had 
freed himself in that poem from the merely per- 
sonal. He has passed in /;/ Memoriam from the particu- 
lar to the universal. Before he had finished that poem, 
the pain of the world of man had flowed into his soul. 
He had reached full manhood in his art. From this 
time forth then, from 1850, when Tennyson was just 
over forty years of age, a vaster emotion belongs to his 
poetry, the solemn swell of the passion of mankind ; 
yet the poetry does not lose, when he desires it, its happy 
brightness. The idyll of The Brook^ published along 
with Maud^ is as gay as it is gentle. Then, too, though 
his poetry has thus more than before to do with the 
larger life of man, he can still see Nature with the keen 
sight and enjoyment of youth. Moreover, he can still 
" follow the Gleam," still breathe with ease the ideal air, 
though his experience has been sad, though maturer 
years have led him to keep closer in his work to the 
facts of real life. 

229 



230 Tennyson 



His poetry has certainly lost some of the animation, 
opulence, unconsciousness in singing, which are qualities 
of youth — of which qualities, however, he seemed to 
have less than other poets, because graver qualities, un- 
usual in youth, balanced them ; but it has gained more 
character ; it knows itself better ; it has more of the 
wisdom of life in it — and yet it has not lost passion. 
Nay, that is more profound ; there is a greater general 
intensity of feeling on subjects worthy of deep regard. 
Moreover, the same width and depth of feeling with 
which he wrote about religion in In Memoriam now 
extended itself over the movements of the world. He 
is in closer sympathy with the life of England at home 
and abroad. The stories of the joys and sorrows of men 
and women which he took as subjects in 1842 {Dora 
and the rest) are now continued, but the colours in which 
he paints them are fuller and deeper in hue, and they are 
also more various. He writes of the farmer, the sailor, 
the city clerk, the parson and lawyer and squire. 
Enoch Arden, Aylmers Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook^ 
The Grandmother, The Northern Farmer, The Sailor 
Boy prove with what variety and power and charm he 
wrought at this vein, and he loved to work in it to the 
very end. 

But it was not only English life at home which en- 
gaged him. He followed up that life abroad. Rumours 
of war and war itself, after 1850, stirred his heart. The 
patriotic spirit which he felt so strongly all his life was 
now awakened, first by the threatening aspect of France, 



" Maud " and the War-Poems 231 

then by the death of the Duke of Wellington, and then 
by the Crimean war. Three short poems, written in 
1852, and published in the newspapers, belong to the 
French menace : Britons^ Guard your Own ! The Third 
of February ! and Hands all round ; God the tyranfs cause 
confound! They are sturdy, full-bodied things, and The 
Third of February maintained against our shameless 
alliance with the Man of December the moral censure 
of England on his murderous work ; 

What ! liave we fought for Freedom from our prime, 
At last to dodge and palter with a public crime ? 

We are grateful to Tennyson for these words, though 
afterwards he seemed to be a partisan of the war in 
which the Third Napoleon became the comrade in arms 
of England. But we may pardon him for that, for it 
was his long hatred of Russia for her bloody work in 
Poland which was at the root of his approval of the 
Crimean war. This patriotism had soon a noble subject 
in the praise of the great Duke. Tennyson issued his 
Ode on the day of Wellington's burial, and republished 
it a year after with many notable changes. This is one 
of his finest poems. It was fitting that the foremost man 
in England, who had worn his honours with a quiet sim- 
plicity for so many years in the " fierce light " which 
shines on a world-wide fame, and in whom the light 
never found anything mean or fearful, should, after his 
death, receive this great and impassioned tribute. What 
he did in politics was always questionable. He was 



232 Tennyson 



nothing of a statesman, as Tennyson calls him. He 
proved his inability when he was called to the Premier- 
ship. Then he was first arrogant, and afterwards per- 
plexed by the mischief he wrought. Indeed, he was 
profoundly ignorant of England ; but, when he found 
out his ignorance, he had the good sense of a great 
general. He knew when to retreat, and he retreated, 
even though his retreat had the appearance of a flight. 
He stood '' four-square to all the winds that blew," but 
when all the winds became one wind, he opened the 
doors to it and bade the Crown and his peers give way. 
This was the wisest thing he did in his old age, and it is 
somewhat characteristic of Tennyson that, except in one 
line, *' rich in saving common sense," he takes no notice 
of it at all. 

" Let all England mourn her greatest son, let all 
England thank God for him, and bury him with honour 
upon honour " — that is the motive of the beginning of 
the poem ; and it is worthy to be felt by a poet and 
by a nation. Magnanimity and magnificence, great- 
mindedness and great-doing, are the life-blood of a 
people. To celebrate them with a lavish splendour 
when he who embodied them in life is dead, is a lesson 
in a people's education. Then Tennyson passes to the 
Duke's glory in war, and perhaps in all commemora- 
tive odes there is nothing finer than *his imagination of 
Nelson waking from his grave in St. Paul's and wonder- 
ing who was coming, with this national mourning, to lie 
beside him : 



" Maud " and the War-Poems 233 

" Who is he that cometh, like an honour'd guest, 

With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest, 

With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest?" 

Mighty Seaman, this is he 

Was great by land as thou by sea. 

This is he that far away 
Against the myriads of Assaye 
Clash'd with his fiery few and won ; 

and the poet, starting from this early battle, sketches 
with rapid and clear pencil the great wars till the day of 
Waterloo. I wish the division of the poem (vii.) begin- 
ning— 

A people's voice ! we are a people yet — 

were excluded from the poem. But that would be to 
wish away one of Tennyson's most characteristic utter- 
ances as a patriot. Nevertheless, it is too exclusively 
English, too controversial, too much an attack on France, 
too contemptuous of the people whom he sees only as 
the mob ; too fond of the force of great men to the ex- 
clusion of the force of the collective movements of the 
nation. A great artist should not overstep so much the 
limits of temperance ; or, to put this otherwise, he should 
not lose his sympathy with the whole of humanity in his 
sympathy with his own country. 

This is, however, as great a poem as the character 
was which it celebrated. The metrical movement 
rushes on where it ought to rush, delays where it 



2 34 Tennyson 



ought to delay. Were the poem set by Handel, 
its rhythmical movements could scarcely be more fit 
from point to point to the things spoken off, more full 
of stately, happy changes. Moreover, the conduct of 
the piece is excellent. It swells upwards in fuller har- 
mony and growing thought till it reaches its climax in 
the division (vi.) about Nelson and Wellington. Then 
it slowly passes downwards in solemn strains like a storm 
dying in the sky, and at the end closes in soft spiritual 
passages of ethereal sound, like the lovely clouds about 
the setting sun when the peace of evening has fallen on 
a tempestuous day. Its conduct is then the conduct of 
one form of the true lyric, that whose climax is in the 
midst, and not at the close. 

During the years which followed this poem Tennyson's 
mind was kept close to the subject of war, though his 
dislike to France had to be placed in abeyance, for these 
were the years of the Crimean war. In 1854 the news 
of the splendid and foolish charge of the Light Brigade 
reached the country, and set it all on fire. When it was 
made, and a petulant mistake had all but annihilated the 
Brigade, Ave forgot the folly in the glory of those who 
rode so steadily to all but certain death. Steady obedi- 
ence, cool self-sacrifice, disbelief in the impossible, 
courage which rises higher the nearer death is at hand, 
are some of the things which have made England. 
They made her glory in this deed of war. It was more 
the glory of the troopers than of the leader, and Tenny- 
son has felt that throughout his song. And since he felt 



*' Maud" and the War-Poems 235 

it, I wish that he had celebrated Inkerman rather than 
this isolated and splendid blunder. Nevertheless, it was 
a fine thing done in the face of the whole world, and it 
has handed down so great a tradition of mortal courage 
and magnificence that it was well worthy of song, and 
Tennyson could hardly help taking it as a poetic theme. 
He did it well ; but the weakness inherent in the subject 
('Some one had blundered ") prevented him from doing 
it very well. 

In after years he took another subject of the same kind, 
and out of the same battle — The Charge of the Heavy 
Brigade at Balaclava. The poem has its own force, but 
it is too like its predecessor. It first appeared in 1882, 
and was published with a prologue and epilogue in 1885. 
The prologue is addressed to General Hamley, and 
contains a charming description of the view from his 
Sussex home, and an allusion to the glory of the war in 
Egypt against Arabi. But it is the epilogue which it is 
right to notice in this place, for it contains his defence 
of his war-poems against Irene, who stands, I suppose, 
for Peace, but who is with all a poet's love of the 
personal, made into a delightful girl. 

You wrong me, passionate little friend. 

I would that wars should cease, 
I would the globe from end to end 

Might sow and reap in peace. 

Yes, Tennyson loved peace, and has sung of it with 
grace and loveliness ; but the objection men have taken 
to the praise of war in Maud is none the less. War is 



236 Tennyson 

held in Maud to be the proper cure for the evils of 
peace, and it is not a cure, but an additional disease. 
In this defence also, he still clings to the notion that 
Trade, "with kindly links of gold," may refrain the 
Powers from war, when Trade, as at present conducted, 
is the most fruitful cause of war. Moreover, he sees, in 
this defence, no way of making true peace but fighting, 
meeting force by force. A poet might have thought of 
other ways ; yet it was scarcely possible that Tennyson, 
with his character, should have seen those other ways. 
We must not expect from a man that which is beyond 
his nature ; and therefore we accept with gratitude his 
declaration in this epilogue — 

And who loves War for War's own sake 
Is fool, or crazed, or worse. 

There is no one also who will not agree with the view 
expressed at the end of the epilogue — that it is right, 
even though the realm be in the wrong in the war, " to 
crown with song the warrior's noble deed." 

And here the Singer for his Art 

Not all in vain may plead 
" The song that nerves a nation's heart, 

Is in itself a deed." 

This is truth he sings, and it makes us wish that he 
had written more war-lyrics on the noble gests of 
Englishmen. He did write two extraordinarily fine 
things — The Fight of the Revenge and The Defence of 



** Maud " and the War-Poems 



Lucknow, but the latter is a little too detailed, a little too 
historical. 

The Charge of the Light Bi'igade was written in 1854. 
In the ye'ar following, Maud appeared. The^war ele- 
ment continues to live in this poem, and its presence 
does not improve, but injures it. War presides at its 
conception, is inwoven with it, and directs its end. The 
beginning of the poem, which attacks, in the mouth of 
a nervous, slothful man, the evils of a world whose 
only god is commerce and whose goddess is com- 
petition, is written with apparently the direct purpose 
of holding up, at the close, war as the remedy for 
those evils. 

For I trust if an enemy's fleet came yonder round by the hill, 

And the rushing battle-bolt sang from the three-decker out of the 

foam, 
That the smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter 

and till, 
And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, 

home. 

This is said in the character of the spleenful hero, but 
yet the verse is Tennyson's own. The war waged the^i 
would be in defence of hearth and home — a just war. 
But the Crimean war was not in that category. And the 
poem ends with that war as the cure for the evils of 
peace. There is too little distinction made between war 
and war. 

Further on, the death of Maud's brother in a duel at 
the hand of Maud's lover, which dissolves the love story 



!38 Tennyson 



in catastrophe, contrasts the sin of private war with the 
nobility of public war for a worthy cause. The mad- 
ness caused by this private revenge is healed by the 
lover joining the national effort to right a wrong. The 
social war of competition is to be also healed by the 
spirit of sacrifice in the nation which is aroused by a 
public war. The whole of this, as I have said before, 
is a great pity. Moreover, this part of the subject is 
artistically unfortunate, for the Crimean war was the most 
foolish, the most uncalled for, and the least deliberate 
of all our wars. It mixed us up with the Emperor of the 
French, a miserable companionship for a country which 
desired honour and freedom. Its management at first 
was a disgrace to the War Office of England. The sub- 
ject, then, of the poem was radically bad so far as the 
war-element in it was concerned, and this acted not only 
on those parts of the poem which belonged to the war, 
but also, even without the artist's consciousness of it, 
disturbed the beauty of the whole, and weakened the 
emotional impression he desired his work to make. An 
element, troubling to art, underlies the handling and the 
conduct of the poem. 

But, in spite of this, Maud, in its joy and sorrow alike, 
is the loveliest of Tennyson's longer poems. It does not 
possess much natural description. We see the landscape 
only in allusions, but it is clear enough. Above is the 
moor-land, dark purple ; below is the shore and the 
loud-resounding sea, whose restless waves in storm 
thunder on the pebbled beach. Between the moor and 



" Maud" and the War-Poems 239 

the sea, on the low ground, are the village and the vil- 
lage church, " gables and spire together " ; and on the 
hillside the hall and garden where Maud lives ; and not 
far off the lover's house, a haunted place, near which is 
a flowery wood and a dark red sandstone hollow in the 
hill. This is the scene where so fateful a passion is 
played, and there is not much of Nature in it. But here 
and there throughout the poem there are separate touches 
full of observation : ^ 

A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime, 

is as faithful to the colour, as this which follows is to the 
sound of the thing described : • 

Just now the dry-tongued laurels' pattering talk 
Seem'd her light foot along the garden walk. 

He saw every year the temper of a south-coast gale and 
the look of the sky : 

Morning arises stormy and pale, 

No sun, but a wannish glare 

In fold upon fold of hueless cloud. 

And the budded peaks of the wood are bow'd. 

Caught and cuffed by the gale : 

I had fancied it would be fair. 

* Nothing can be closer to truth than the line 

" The scream of a madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave ; " 

but it is only true for the beach of the southern coast where the sea- 
rounded pebbles of the chalk, piled in loose banks on the shore, are 
rolled over and over, grating and grinding, by the retreating wave. 



240 Tennyson 

Contrast with this wild cloudy morning the quiet pure 
sky of a night in spring — fitted, as it is, to the dark calm 
which had followed the lover's madness : 



My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year 

When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs, 

And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer 

And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns 

Over Orion's grave low down in the west, 

That like a silent lightning under the stars 

She seem'd to divide in a dream from a band of the blest. 



These are broad sketches, but Tennyson can do the 
most minute and finest drawing, and no better example 
exists of it than the description of the tiny shell the 
lover finds on the beach. The shell is dead, but the 
poet's animating hand cannot bear that it should be life- 
less ; and he images, with the finest sympathy, with orna- 
menting love, its last inhabitant : 

The tiny cell is forlorn, 
Void of the little living will 
That made it stir on the shore. 
Did he stand at the diamond door 
Of his house in a rainbow frill ? 
Did he push, when he was uncurl'd, 
A golden foot or a fairy horn 
Thro' his dim water-world ? 

These are direct descriptions of Nature, but Maud is 
remarkable, even among the other poems, for the deter- 
mined way in which Nature is charged in it with the 
human passions. The hollow where the lover's ruined 



'' Maud " and the War-Poems 241 

father slew himself is red, flower and rock, to the eyes of 
his son. 

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, 
The red-ribb-'d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood. 

He had lost his fortune by speculation, wherefore, when 
he walked out, 

the wind like a broken worldling wail'd, 
And the-flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove through the 



When the lover first hopes for Maud's love, every bird 
in the sky cries to her and calls to her ; the daisies that 
her foot touches are rose-tinted by her touch. All the 
world from west to east, all the seas, blush with joy 
when she is on the point of yielding. The great cedar 
that sighs for Lebanon sighs no more, for it is haunted 
by her starry head, over whom 

thy darkness must have spread 
With such delight as theirs of old, thy great 
Forefathers of the thornless garden, there 
Shadowing the snow-limb'd Eve from whom she came. 

The stars, feeling with his joy, go in and out on the 
heavens with merry play. 

A livelier emerald twinkles on the grass, 
A purer sapphire melts into the sea. 

The swell of the long waves on the shore is enchanted ; 

and in that lovely song, when her lover waits for Maud 

in the dawn, and the planet of love begins 
16 



242 Tennyson 



to faint in the light that she loves 
On a bed of daffodil sky. 



he transfers all the passion of his heart to the flowers 
and the flowers become part of his heart. " The soul 
of the rose went into my blood." The lilies kept awake 
all night with him. When she is coming at last, the 
garden speaks for him : 

There has fallen a splendid tear 

From the passion-flower at the gate. 
She is coming, my dove, my dear : 

She is coming, my life, my fate ; 
The red rose cries — " She is near, she is near " ; 

And the white rose weeps — ** She is late " ; 
The larkspur listens — " I hear, I hear" ; 

And the lily whispers — " I wait."' 

No example can be better of this method by which 
Nature is made the reflection and illustration of a human 
soul, except perhaps this beautiful thing — 

From the meadow your walks have left so sweet 

That whenever a March wind sighs 
He sets the jewel-print of your feet 

In violets blue as your eyes, 
To the woody hollows in which we meet 

And the valleys of Paradise. 

As to the upbuilding of the poem, Tennyson called it 
a Monodrama. The story, though very simple, is capable 
of bringing together a host of complex feelings, and in the 
one character of the hero they all clash into a drama of 
the soul. Fate, too, broods over it from the beginning. 



'* Maud " and the War-Poems 243 

Given the characters of Maud and her lover, and the 
events that preceded their love, the tragedy is inevi- 
table. This is a justly dramatic situation. We expect 
the ruin ; and the transient happiness of the lovers only 
renders it more pitiable. But the openly dramatic part 
of the poem ends with the first part where Maud's 
brother is slain by her lover, and the girl dies of the 
double pain. The second part is the result of this 
catastrophe on the life of the hero — his flight, his mad- 
ness, and the resurrection of his manliness. The dra- 
matic element in this part is in the mind of the lover — in 
the involution and struggle of the sane and insane in 
him. 

The hero is a nervous, affectionate, half-hysterical 
person, often gentle, often violent from weakness ; who 
lives on the edge of the supernatural ; morbidly excited 
by the suicide of his father, by his lonely life, and by 
brooding in inaction on those iniquities of commerce 
which ruined his father, and which he imputes to the 
whole of society. The roots of his hair are stirred when 
his father's corse is brought home at night. He hears the 
dead moaning in his house at noon, and his own name 
called in the silence. The physical irritability transfers 
itself to his moral world, and becomes a weak anger 
with man and God without one effort to meet the evils 
at which he screams. His first utterance in the poem 
is a long shriek in a high falsetto note against the wrongs 
and curses which come of a vile peace. " Is it peace or 
war ? " he cries ; " better war ! loud war by land and sea." 



244 Tennyson 



And then he thinks of Maud, who was his playmate. 
She is coming home. " What is she now ? My dreams 
are bad. She may bring me a curse." When Maud 
comes, his diseased pride pictures her as cold and con- 
temptuous, while his heart is thrilled by her charm. Pride 
and first love are at a variance, and he has no strength 
to decide between them. Now one, now the other gains 
the mastery. And in the strife, he breaks into fury with 
the world again. All men and women are slanderers 
and cheats, and Nature is one with rapine. " The whole 
little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey." 
And we are puppets in the hand of an unseen power, 
and degraded puppets. Nature and man and God, 
if there be a God, are all bad. 

On this shattered character Maud dawns like the 
morning ; fresh, simple, and young, full of gentle feeling, 
easily won to love ; romantic, having her womanhood in 
a sweet purity and grace, but as yet with no character — 
characterless, like Miranda. And her joyousness breaks 
in on his gloom. He hears her singing : 

A passionate ballad gallant and gay, 
A martial song like a trumpet's call. 
Singing alone in the morning of life, 
In the happy morning of life and of May. 

Singing of honour and death in battle — for now the war 
motive steals in — till he is ready to weep for a sordid 
time, and for his own base languor. From that moment 
their love runs on from point to point. His character 
forbids him to believe in her ; yet he cannot but 



" Maud " and the War-Poems 245 

believe in her a little, for love has mastered him. 
Jealousy comes next, and in the turmoil within he 
recognises that he is not a true man. It is a man the 
country wants, some strong man to rule it ; it is a man 
he needs himself to be, and the midmost motive of the 
poem is in the lines : 

And ah for a man to arise in me, 
That the man I am may cease to be ! 

Then comes the outburst of this enfeebled character, 
half conscious of its possibility of madness, for the joy 
of love — one of the finer passionate things of Tennyson : 

let the solid ground 
Not fail beneath my feet 

Before my life has found 

What some have found so sweet ; 
Then let come what come may, 
What matter if I go mad, 

1 shall have had my day. 

He meets Maud in the woodland places, and begms 
to hope, and at night he wanders round her house. And 
here Tennyson calls up again the special note in this 
lover's nature, the nervous thrill which passes into pre- 
sentiment of evil even in the moment of his joyous hope, 
and which is awakened by so slight a thing as all the 
curtains of the house being drawn close. He hears no 
sound where he stands but the rivulet running and the 
dash of the waves, but he looks and sees all round the 
house 



246 Tennyson 



The death-white curtain drawn ; 

Felt a horror over me creep, 

Prickle my skin and catch my breath, 

Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep, 

Yet I shudder'd and thought like a fool of the sleep of death. 

The same half-physical, half-imaginative horror comes 
on him in the very height of his delight, when Maud has 
promised to love him. All the beginning of the splendid 
ode of joy he sings to his heart is full of love's loveliest 
rapture : 

I have led her home, my love, my only friend. 

It continues rapturous to almost the close. But mortal 
affairs never stand for long on the topmost peak. And 
this man was sure to tremble into a suggestion of misery 
when he was most victorious in delight. " Beat, happy 
stars," he cries, " timing with things below. 

Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell, 
Blest, but for some dark undercurrent woe 
That seems to draw — but it shall not be so : 
Let all be well, be well." 

Another element comes into the poem when Maud's 
brother arrives. The lover hates him. Is he not the 
son of the man who cheated and ruined his father ? Yet 
Maud loves her brother, and Maud has loved himself. 
Shall he not then cease to hate ? Shall he not forgive ? 
May he never forget, in his hatred of the brother, all he 
owes to the sister ! Yes, may God make him then more 
wretched even than he has been. And he feels hysteri- 



" Maud " and the War-Poems 247 

cally happy that he is free from hate, when, in reality, 
it only needs a touch to bring the hatred to the surface 
and to make him forget everything in the moment, 
except the moment. He has no strength, no steadiness, 
no self-control. All this is careful preparation for the 
catastrophe, and for the madness that follows it. The 
inevitableness of the end is seen in the character. And 
it is fine intellectual work, an excellence in this poem 
which is too much forgotten in the admiration we give 
to its beautiful love-passages — an excellence which is 
even greater in the descriptions of the lover's madness 
in the second part of the poem. 

At last, these two meet in the garden, and while he 
waits, he sings that lovely song which all the world 
knows, and on which I need not dwell, but in which, 
through all its eager emotion, the poet does not lose his 
intellectual self-control, nor his steady directing of his 
subject. He prepares, at its very close, for one of the 
most forcible motives which he uses regarding the lover's 
madness in the second part — the motive of the living 
man believing that he is dead and that Maud, were she 
to come, would make him rise again. Here is this pre- 
paring passage, a leitmotif for the next part, the melody 
of which Wagner would introduce again and again in 
the second part : 

She is coming, my own, my sweet ; 

Were it ever so airy a tread, 
My heart would hear her and beat, 

Were it earth in an earthy bed ; ■ 



248 Tennyson 



My dust would hear her and beat, 
Had I lain for a century dead ; 
Would start and tremble under her feet, 
And blossom in purple and red. 

She comes ; the brother finds them together ; in rage he 
strikes Maud's lover, answering a fierce outbreak of 
wrath. But even before his sweetheart this lover has no 
power over himself, and he strikes again. The duel 
follows ; the brother is slain, and Maud sees the slaugh- 
ter. On the top of rapturous love comes bloody tragedy. 
The second part follows. The lover has fled, Maud's 
wild cry in his ears, and a ghostly image of her haunting 
his steps. His brain is for a time on the verge of mad- 
ness, and Tennyson pictures this tottering condition 
along with love's pathetic agony. Then a time of real 
madness supervenes, and this also the poet strives to 
paint as it would be in the character he has drawn. 
Both these states of mind and emotion are wrought with 
the most careful intellectual consideration. A study of 
the characteristics of madness and its approach seems to 
lie behind them, and to have preceded the emotional 
representation of the mortal sorrow and love of the hero. 
This scientific element is a little too prominent, at least 
it is so in Part v., which begins. 

Dead, long dead 
Long dead ! 

in which the madness has fully come. The mind of 
a madman gambols from the point in hand, and Tenny- 



I 



" Maud " and the War-Poems 249 

son has skilfully wrought this out. But these sudden 
changes do not arise, as Tennyson makes them arise, 
from a thought or a memory suggested by what the 
madman is saying to himself, so much as from some 
physical change in himself, or from some suggestion 
to his senses from the world without. Here his mad- 
ness is set off on a new path by the words he hears 
himself using. He runs away on the new images they 
suggest to him. And as this is the case, the whole of 
this Part v. falls almost into a logical order, as if at the 
bottom of his madness the man was not mad at all. 
We can trace, then, the elaborate argumentative way in 
which Tennyson has worked it out — a thing we cannot 
do, for example, in the madness of Ophelia — a similar 
madness of love and sorrow and death. The picture 
is also carefully made up of scattered impressions 
recorded in the first part of the poem. These are 
apparently huddled together in the disorder of madness, 
but it is not really so. They have a connection, and the 
stitches which unite them are too clear. The inter- 
spersed reflections are also too sane — as, for instance, 

Friend, to be struck by the public foe, 
Then to strike him and lay him low, 
That were a public merit, far, 
Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin ; 
But the red life spilt for a private blow — 
I swear to you, lawful and lawless war 
Are scarcely even akin. 

A madman might think a part of it, but not the whole, 
and not in that way. 



250 Tennyson 



Even in two previous divisions (ii. and iv.) reflections 
are introduced which are too exclusively of the intellect. 
They lower the emotional note by their intrusion. The 
verse in division ii. — 

Strange, that the mind, when fraught 

With a passion so intense 

One would think that it well 

Might drown all life in the eye — 

That it should, by being so overwrought, 

Suddenly strike on a sharper sense 

For a shell, a flower, little things 

Which else would have been past by ! 

And now, I remember, I, 

When he lay dying there, 

I noticed one of his many rings 

(For he had many, poor worm) and thought 

It is his mother's hair — 

is out of tune with the rest of this lovely and pathetic 
poem. I wish also that the physiological reflection in 
verse 8 of division iv. were out of the poem : 

'T is the blot upon the brain 
That will show itself without. 

Every now and then the science Tennyson chose to 
meddle with enters into his art in this distressful way. 

With these slight exceptions, the divisions ii., iii., and 
iv., in which the approach of madness is drawn, are of 
extraordinary loveliness. They do not sound the deep- 
sea depths of sorrow, remorse, and love, but they are of 
an exquisite and pathetic gentleness, and their grief and 
love are as profound as the character Tennyson has 



*' Maud " and the War-Poems 25 1 



drawn was capable of feeling. In iv. he rises with that 
lonely cry at the beginning, 

O that 't were possible 

After long grief and pain 

To find the arms of my true love 

Round me once again, 

into perhaps the tenderest music of sorrow in all his 
poetry, half of sweet memories of the past, half of 
broken misery in the present, and with one touch of 
hope for the future made out of the image of his love in 
heaven. If only he had left out these lines in the last 
verse, 

And I loathe the square and streets, 
And the faces that one meets, 
Hearts with no love for me, 

the end would be as perfect as the beginning. 

Part iii. is the resurrection of the lover, and is dedi- 
cated to war as the redeeming power. The first verse is 
beautiful, but it is strange for a soul in the peace of 
heaven to place a new hope for the world in the Crimean 
war ; nor do the fine passages and river-rolling metre of 
the rest of the poem excuse, in my opinion, the advo- 
cacy of war, by means of art, as the saviour from 
national sin. 

In conclusion, there are yet two things to say. The first 
regards the intellectual power revealed in the first and 
second parts of the poem, in due subordination to the 
rule of passionate imagination. There is no view so mis- 



252 Tennyson 



taken as the common view, that poets, because they deal 
chiefly with the emotions, are for that very reason less 
intellectual than men whose work lies in science, phi- 
losophy, logic, or law. On the contrary, it is in the 
sphere of the highest and deepest emotions, when they 
are so controlled by the artist's will towards the perfect 
representation of his idea as not to flame in violent rush 
but to burn with a steady core of white fire, that the 
loftiest efforts and successes of the intellect of man are 
made, and reach their keenest point of expression. 
Every great poem, then — and no poem can be great 
without intensity of feeling — is also a treasure-house of 
the intellectual powers, and can be studied, like a uni- 
verse, from that point of view. Maud is not one of the 
least of these. 

Secondly, I have made certain criticisms on Maud, 
and I am troubled by having made them. To point out 
imperfections, or what seem to me imperfections, in a 
poem I love so dearly, is like a patriot who draws atten- 
tion to the imperfections of his country. But if he love 
her well and honestly, his country is none the worse. 
She is so far above him, and her beauty is so clear, and 
he is so conscious of it, that no one, he thinks, will 
imagine that he desires to lessen the world's admiration 
of her. And Maud is so beautiful a poem that the 
small regrets of criticism are as nothing in comparison 
with the large delights its poetry gives. Moreover, the 
criticisms may be all wrong. When we approach a great 
poet's work, our proper position is humility. 



" Maud " and the War-Poems 253 

But these criticisms have been all of one kind. They 
have objected to the intrusion of scientific analysis into 
a work of art, and to the direction of it to the support 
of a disputable moral theory — that the nation and the 
individual may be set free from selfishness by war. 
These objections are stronger against Maud tha,n against 
a different kind of poem, because Maud is, of all Ten- 
nyson's longer poems, the most distinctly a piece of 
pure art. All the love story, both in its joy and sorrow, 
lies solely in the realm of imaginative and passionate 
art, and its loveliness is there supreme. The jarring 
note then which is made by intellectual analysis, and by 
moral purpose, pushed into this sweeter and higher 
realm, is more harsh and grating than it would be in a 
poem not so divinely beautiful. This, which is the real 
excuse for the criticisms, is in itself an additional 
homage to those lovely, unalloyed parts of the poem 
which are charged with personal emotion alone. 

It is difficult to say anything in praise of these parts, 
because that which reaches a high loveliness is above 
all praise. It is loved of those who can love it. When 
they are asked why they love it, they answer, " I love it 
because I love it," and when they are asked why it is 
good, they answer, " Because it is good ; he that hath 
ears to hear let him hear." What are we to do with folk 
who cannot hear the soft, wild, changeful music of verse 
and of emotion — repeating one another in difference, 
each echo awakening a new melody and beauty mak- 
ing all their atmosphere — of poems like 



2 54 Tennyson 



A voice by the cedar tree, 

or, still more varied in interwoven changes of feeling, 
each change it makes with its own metrical form — that 
high canzone of enchanted love — 

I have led her home, my love, my only friend. 

But why should I say more ? It is impossible to criti- 
cise these things, to explain why they or the Garden 
Song are beautiful, or why the poem of the broken 
heart, "O that 'twere possible," reaches in simplicity 
those depths of sorrow where beauty sits in the garb of 
pity and subdues the soul. 




CHAPTER X 

IDYLLS OF THE KING 

IN the Idylls of the King Tennyson has worked up 
into a whole the ancient story of Arthur, a story 
which is at least a thousand years old. How it 
first arose none can tell. Whether it has any historical 
basis it is also impossible to decide. It is supposed that 
there was an historical Arthur who fought twelve great 
battles with the English heathen, and who had many 
hero-chieftains under his sway and in his devotion, but 
the more we look at him the more his figure recedes into 
the mist of legend or of myth. Even the country where 
he reigned, and the lands over which his wars were 
waged, are not known to us. Some scholars make him 
a warrior of Southern Britain. Others place him in the 
North, beyond the Border, and he fights with the Saxon 
chiefs from Dumbarton to the eastern coast, beating 
them back in twelve great battles. Out of the dim 
vapour of ancientry these two great figures rise, and the 
name of Arthur alone mingles them into one. Tennyson 
takes the first tradition, and it is the one that has the 
most prevailed in literature. 

255 



256 Tennyson 



It is not, however, with an historical, but with a myth- 
ical Arthur that we have to deal, and we need not be 
forced to surrender the wild island of Tintagil, the mystic 
expanse of Lyonnesse, the rock of Glastonbury rising 
from its marshes, and the lovely meadows round Caer- 
leon upon Usk. There is our romantic country ; there 
the legendary land where Arthur was born ; there the 
valley of Avalon where he took refuge when wounded to 
the death. There is not one touch of the real world in 
all the scenery that Tennyson invents in his poem. It 
belongs throughout to that country which eye hath not 
seen nor ear heard, but which the heart of man has imag- 
ined. It is more than invented landscape. It often 
breathes the atmosphere of the fairy lands, and of those 
dreams which open the spaceless realms beyond our 
senses. It seems to be born before the sight and then 
to die and be born in another form — changing, yet un- 
changed. No mortal hands have built the city of Arthur 
and his palace. It is no land dwelt in by bold bad men 
we see, when Arthur rides through the mountains and 
finds the diamonds ; when Geraint and Enid go through 
the green gloom of tne wood ; when Galahad rides over 
the black swamp, leaping from bridge to bridge till he 
sail to the spiritual city ; when Lancelot drives through 
the storm to the enchanted towers of Carbonek seven 
days across the sea. Nor is the Nature actual Nature, 
but that which is seen 

From magic casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn. 



Idylls of the King 257 

And when we can disburden ourselves of the ethics and 
allegory, the personages are still as dreamlike as the 
landscape, old as the seas that roll over Lyonnesse, and 
yet young for ever in imagination. In our everyday 
world the Arthur and Guinevere of Romance, Lancelot 
and the Lady of the Lake, Gawain and Galahad, Perci- 
vale and Elaine are unreal shapes ; yet how real they 
are in a better world ! The interests of the world we 
call real fade and die, our children will not care for 
them ; for half of them, for those that are not founded 
on love, we do not care ourselves ; but the interests of 
romance are eternal. They blossom into a new spring 
year by year, and we take more thought for the fates of 
Lancelot and Guinevere than we do for what the Swede 
intends or what the French. For " fable is Love's 
world," and the great myths and their figures are the 
dear inhabitants of the heart of man. Centuries have 
been stirred and thrilled by Arthur and his knights. 
England, France, Germany, and Italy have awakened 
into creation at their Celtic touch ; and poetry, painting, 
sculpture, and music have replied to their enchantment. 
From Cormvall or the North the story got to Wales ; 
from Wales it fled to Brittany. From Brittany it re- 
turned to Wales and crossed the March into England 
in the Brut of Layamon, the first English poem of the 
imagination after the Conquest. But before that time, 
it had got from Brittany into France, and from France 
in French to England, where prose tales in Latin and 

poems in English and in Norman French sent it far and 
17 



258 Tennyson 



wide. Chaucer owned its power ; Malory embodied it ; 
Spenser seized it ; Milton thought of it as an epic ; 
Dryden considered it ; Wordsworth touched it ; Tenny- 
son took up its lyre again ; Morris and Swinburne and 
Arnold entered into its enchanted land. But it was 
characteristic of Tennyson's steadiness of temper and 
fulness of thought that he should try to make his form 
of it complete and new-created. At first it moved him 
only as romance, and we have seen how his youth 
played with it in The Lady of Shalott^ in Sir Galahad^ 
and in the ride of Lancelot and Guinevere through 
woods of love and spring. Then in the Morte d' Arthur 
the story was fitted in 1842 by certain modern touches 
to modern life, yet these had to be explained by the pro- 
logue and epilogue. In that poem itself the tale was 
chief ; it follows the old romance and breathes its air. 

In 1842, when the Morte d' Arthur appeared, Tenny- 
son does not seem to have thought of making the story 
allegorical. I do not even think that when the first four 
Idylls were published — Geraint and Enid ; Merlin and 
Viviefi ; Lancelot and Elaine ; and Guinevere — Tennyson 
wrote them with a set allegorical intention. They are 
only modernised by being made a representation of true 
love and false love. Vivien the harlot is set over against 
the tender innocence of Elaine. Enid, the true wife, is 
opposed to Guinevere who has been untrue. The men 
also represent different phases of love as modern as they 
are ancient. Geraint and Merlin, Lancelot and Arthur, 
have each their distinct lesson — beyond the story — to 



: 



Idylls of the King 259 

modern life. They have not yet become allegorical, and 
even the lesson, the ethical aim, is as yet subordinate to 
the story. True conduct, as is just in art, is indirectly, 
not directly taught. 

But when we come to 1870 — to the volume which 
began with The Coming of Arthtii- — the inner intention 
of the whole poem seems to be changed. The making 
of a kind of epic out of the story of Arthur, which 
should have an instructive but indirect relation to the 
moral needs of society and the individual, is placed upon 
the second plane. The poem is now an allegory of the 
soul of man warring with sense, and passing on its way 
through life to death, and through death to resurrection. 
The great rulers of the kingdom of human nature — the 
intellect, the conscience, the will, the imagination, the 
divine spirit in man — are shadowed forth in mystic per- 
sonages. The historic powers which stand outside the 
soul and help it to reign and work — the Church, the 
Law, the great Graces of God-^are also embodied. 
Moreover, the various conditions of human nature in 
its growth from brutality to an ordered kingdom, that 
which saves or loses true life, the general desires and 
tendencies of man, the temptations which beset him, the 
wise and unwise views of the goal of life, the love which 
saves, the love which ruins, the religious passion which 
leads aright and that which leads astray, are symbolised 
before us in a number of other personages, episodes, and 
events invented by Tennyson for the sake of his allegory. 

The Coming of Arthur shows this conception fully 



26o Tennyson 

orbed in the mind of Tennyson. Arthur is the rational 
soul, not the son of Uther and Ygerne, but coming mys- 
teriously from heaven and washed into Merlin's arms by 
a great wave. Merlin, who educates him is intellectual 
power, with all the magic of science. Arthur's kingship 
is opposed by the brutal and sensual powers in human 
nature, but the soul beats them down, and lets in light 
and justice over the waste places of human nature where 
the ape, the tiger, and the bandit lurk. Guinevere is the 
heart, and all we mean by the term. The soul, to do its 
work, must be knit to the heart in noble marriage — 
Arthur must be wed to Guinevere. The Knights of the 
Round Table are the high faculties in man whom the 
soul builds into order round it, to do its just and re- 
forming will. When the King is crowned and married 
the three great fairies that stand by are Faith, Hope, and 
Charity ; and the Lady of the Lake, " clothed in white 
samite, mystic, wonderful," who gives the soul Excalibur 
— the sword of the Spirit — with which to do his war- 
work against base sense, appetite, and their disordered 
tyranny, is the Church. In embodying these concep- 
tions, every word, every adjective, every description is 
weighed by Tennyson. The symbolism is extended into 
the remotest recesses of the tale. The allegory is thus 
fully launched in The Coming of Arthur, and the Idylls 
that were published with it, and that followed it, were 
written to the allegory. Even those that preceded it 
appear to have been somewhat modified to suit its 
requirements. 



Idylls of the King 261 

The question now arises, Of what kind was this alle- 
gory of Tennyson's, and how did he manage it ? It 
differed from the allegories that preceded it. The great 
mediaeval allegory. The Romance of the Rose (the type of 
all allegory in the Middle Ages), was nothing but an 
allegory. There was no story connected with it which 
was independent of the allegory. The series of events 
and adventures which brought the knight at last to the 
enjoyment of the Rose were allegorically invented, and 
each of them had its meaning. The story was obscure 
and the allegory was plain. But in Tennyson's poem the 
story existed already ; it was independent of the allegory, 
and it forms an important part of the poem. Neither 
is the allegory plain ; it is hidden beneath the story. 

Our next great allegory is The Faerie Queene. That is 
also plainly allegorical. The names make the meaning 
clear. The Red Cross Knight, Una, Duessa, Orgoglio, 
the Dragon, all tell their tale. But there is much more 
of a story in this first book of The Faerie Queene (and I 
speak of the first book alone, for it is the only one which 
has a clear unity) than there is in The Romance of the 
Rose. We are nearly as much interested in the knight, 
in Una, and in many of the minor characters, as we 
might be if they were real personages, and not images 
of truth and purity, of pride and falsehood and hypoc- 
risy. But in Tennyson's poem the story is often greater 
than the allegory ; it still breathes, and moves, and in- 
terests those to whom allegory is a weariness. At other 
times the story is of equal weight with the allegory, and 



262 Tennyson 



we can ignore the allegory if it please us to do so. This 
separates altogether the Idylls of the King from The 
Faerie Queene. Moreover, the names are not allegorical. 
We have to search for a hidden, not to follow a plain 
allegory. Spenser invented a story to suit his concep- 
tion ; Tennyson took an old tale and inserted his con- 
ception into it. But he was forced by his allegorical 
end to frequently invent as well, and his inventions, 
though they are often of the finest quality (as in The 
Holy Grail), confuse our interest in the story as much 
as the story confuses their meaning. The allegory and 
the tale do not fit throughout. They clash and trouble 
one another. ^A.\\ allegory, to be right in art, ought to 
have a story entirely invented for its purpose. 

The next great allegory with which we may compare 
that of Tennyson is the first book of The Pilgrim s 
Progress. This is the finest allegory in the English 
language — the ideal art-thing. It proclaims itself an 
allegory by the names. The city of Vanity Fair, the 
Delectable Mountains, tell what they are ; and yet these 
places seem as real as London and the Surrey hills. 
Christian and Pliable, Faithful and the Old Adam, 
Wanton and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Great-Heart and 
Giant Despair, tell also who and what they are ; and 
yet they are all alive, they talk like living beings ; we 
have met them in life — yesterday in the streets ; they 
awaken the keenest human interest. 

It is this combination of reality and allegory, of story 
and symbol, each of them clear, vivid, and human, and 



Idylls of the King 263 

both going straight home to the experiences of the soul, 
which lifts The Pilgrim s Progress into the highest place. 
The story and the allegory are of almost equal weight 
in the imagination. The inherent fault of an allegory — 
want of human interest — has been overcome without 
any loss of the allegorical interest. This is a real 
triumph. Nobody else but Dante has done it, and his 
way was only partly allegorical. Tennyson has not 
done it. His poem is not plainly an allegory, nor is it 
plainly a story. Sometimes the men and the women are 
real, sometimes they are mere shadows. Sometimes the 
events are human and romantic, sometimes they are 
metaphysical, theological ideas in a romantic dress. 
We glide from reality to vision and from vision to real- 
ity. The two things are not amalgamated. In fact, 
the allegory might as well have been left out altogether, 
and this statement, if it be true, condemns the allegory 
in the Idylls of the King. Nevertheless, there is some- 
thing more to be said. Bunyan reached his perfection 
of work in this kind of literature by natural naivete, by 
the unconsciousness and the faith of a childlike imagina- 
tion. Tennyson reached what excellence he did reach 
in this matter by sheer dint of intellect. Few things 
have given me so high an idea of Tennyson's intellectual 
power as separate from his imagination, as his fitting in 
of the allegorical conceptions into the body of the story. 
He does not succeed in doing it well, because it was not 
in art to do it well ; but the efforts his intellect makes 
to do it, and the comparative success he attained, are 



264 Tennyson 



proof of great intellectual power. They are failures, 
but they are gigantic struggles for success. 

It is almost a pity that he made these efforts at all. 
They confuse his ethical ends, and they were not needed 
to attain those ends. All he wanted to teach he could 
have taught and does teach through the acts of the men 
and women of the story. The repentance of Guinevere 
and the forgiveness of Arthur are far more impressive, 
and far simpler in their lesson to life, when we see Ar- 
thur as Arthur, and Guinevere as Guinevere, than when 
we see Arthur as the rational soul, and Guinevere as the 
heart, in human nature. Moreover, they are not only 
needless and confusing efforts, they are also not good art. 
They are apart from the true realm of poetry. We are 
conscious that in working them out and weaving them in, 
elaborate thinking has taken the place of creative emo- 
tion; that art has partly abdicated her throne to the under- 
standing. Whenever the allegory is mingled up with the 
story, the poetry is disturbed, the tale is weak, and we 
are a little wearied. This is not the case when the story 
is all allegorical, when it is invented by Tennyson for 
the allegory, as in The Holy Grail. Then there is no 
confusion, and the poem is in the highest degree poetic. 
What I say applies to the mixed poems, like Merlin ajid 
Vivien. Moreover, the artist's childlike pleasure in the 
tale, and his sympathy with its passionate elements, are 
replaced (when the allegory is too obviously intruded) 
by a want of naturalness, even by a kind of pride in 
cleverness, which that parveiiu., the analysing intellect, 



I 



Idylls of the King 265 

always bring into poetry. I sometimes seem to detect 
that Tennyson really loved the work his intellect did on 
the allegory more than the work his imagination did 
upon the story ; that he loved the meanings he inserted 
into the tale more than the noble tale itself. This was 
a great mistake on his part, a mistake that artists make 
when they are seduced by the understanding. No one, 
a hundred years hence, will care a straw about the alle- 
gory ; but men will always care for the story, and how 
the poet has made the persons in it set forth their human 
nature on the stage of life. The humanity, not the 
metaphysics, is the interesting thing, and Malory's book, 
though Tennyson decries its morality, is more human 
more moral, than the Idylls of the King. Even the far- 
off mythic Arthur is more at home with us than the 
Arthur of the Idylls whenever we are forced to consider 
him as the rational soul. 

Tennyson was led away from this simple human posi- 
tion, yet he loved his mistake. '' Accept," he writes to 
the Queen, " accept this old imperfect tale " : 

New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul 
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost, 
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak. 
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still ; or him 
Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one 
Touch'd by the adulterous finger of a time 
That hover'd between war and wantonness, 
And crownings and dethronements. 

This is to like his allegory better than the story, the 
work of his intellect more than the work of ancient 



266 Tennyson 



imagination ; and there are a good number of persons 
who will thank Tennyson for this kind of thing. They 
will be happy to find out all about the allegory, and 
when they have found it out, and labelled all the char- 
acters and explained the metaphysical relations of these 
shadows, will persuade themselves that they are enjoying 
poetry. It is, however, an enjoyment of the understand- 
ing, not one of the imagination, a pleasure in analysis, 
not in beauty. Let them have their way ; they have 
their reward. But our reward will be to be able to leave, 
as much as possible, the allegory alone, and to be happy 
with that which is passionate, sensuous, human, simple 
and lovely in the poem, and in the ravishment the imagi- 
nation has in the seeing of these things. 

There is plenty of opportunity for such work, in spite 
of the allegory, in the Idylls of the King. The romance 
of the story has caught hold of the imagination of Ten- 
nyson, and in his treatment of it he has made many 
fresh and delightful inventions — not allegorical, but 
romantic. He has had great pleasure in opening out 
and developing the ancient characters, in clothing them 
with new dresses of thought, in fitting new emotions to 
the old events in which they play their parts. He has 
re-created some characters altogether : and even the 
leading personages are frequently quite independent of 
his allegory. He has built up around his people the 
image of a whole country, with its woods and streams, 
hills and moors, marsh and desert, dark oceans rolling in 
on iron coasts, vast wastes, ancient records of a bygone 



Idylls of the King 267 

world ; hamlets and towns and wonderful cities, halls and 
great palace-courts with all their varied architecture ; 
storms, and sunshine, all kinds of weather, Nature in her 
moods of beauty and brightness, of gloom and horror. 
And over them he has shed a light from the ancient 
time, a romantic air and sky. These things belong to 
art. 

Moreover, within the realm of art much might be 
said of the technic of the verse. The poem belongs — 
though its composition stretched over so many years — 
to the central period of the blank verse of Tennyson, 
before he had wrought out (not to his or our advantage) 
a new kind of blank verse for his dramas, the habitude 
of which stole into the blank verse of his old-age, 
and made it in undramatic poems less musical, less 
delightful, even less skilful than it was of old. But 
here, through this long series of poems, the blank verse 
is of almost equal excellence throughout. It is, as a 
vehicle of thought and emotion, entirely at the poet's 
command. He can make it do exactly what he likes. 
It has, at his choice, ease and rapidity, or slow and 
stately movement, or it echoes in its sound the thought, 
the scene, or the thing. It is by turns loud or low, soft 
or rough in spirit, fluid or rigid, abrupt, delayed, smooth, 
continuous, weighty and light. There are also none of 
the changes, tricks and placing of caesura or accent 
which all the artists of the past in blank verse and 
especially Milton have used, with which Tennyson is 
not acquainted, and which he does not himself use 



268 Tennyson 



with as much science as art. Yet the result is all 
his own. His blank verse stands apart, original, 
growing out of his own character and temper, and fre- 
quently modified and specialised by the special char- 
acters whom he is describing, and by the special forms 
of natural scenery which he paints. Lastly, it is extra- 
ordinarily concise — almost too concise. It sometimes 
becomes bald ; its " tricks " are sometimes too plain and 
too often repeated ; it often wants a rushing movement, 
and it is always a little too academic. We are too con- 
scious of its skill, of the infinite care spent on it, of a 
certain want of naturalness ; that is, it has the defects 
of its qualities. But we forget these defects when 
it is at its best. Then indeed it is extraordinarily 
noble, rolling like a full-fed river through the country 
of imagination. Such is it in The Holy Grail^ in Guine- 
vere^ in The Passing of Arthur. 

The Coming of Arthur^ the first of these Idylls, is 
Tennyson's prologue to them all. The allegory and the 
story are both mingled in it — but in this poem the alle- 
gory is more prominent than the story. In this Induc- 
tion, Tennyson, having now determined on an allegory, 
is forced to place its main lines before his readers. 

The Idyll opens with the waste and harried kingdom 
of Leodogran, beast-ridden, heathen-ridden, and the 
weak king hiding with his daughter Guinevere in his 
castle. Then Leodogran calls on Arthur for help, and 
Arthur, riding by the castle, sees Guinevere, and loves 



Idylls of the King 269 

her for his life ; and having set her father free from foes, 
asks in reward her hand. So stand forth the two, 
Arthur and Guinevere, who are to grow more and more 
apart as life moves on ; who, meeting in high youth and 
joy, are to meet for the last time in deep repentance and 
forgiveness on the banks of the river of Death — a whole 
world of failure and sin and the ruin of great hopes 
behind them : a common tragedy ! Tennyson hews out 
these figures with a rough, animating chisel in this first 
poem. In the poems that follow they are finished. But 
he does all that is needed now, and does it well. Guine- 
vere is but slightly touched, but Arthur's character is, 
as is fitting, more elaborately treated. 

He is to be the ideal king — the ruler of men ; the 
bringer of law and peace and good government into his 
world, the redeemer of waste places and wasted lives, the 
knitter together into one compact body of his knights 
for purity of life and overthrowing of wrong. 

But he is to be more than king : he is to be the ideal 
man ; and for that he must love. Love then is born 
in him, but it is put into connection with his kingly 
work. No work without love, but no continuance of 
love without work ; equal love of woman and work, but 
neither the woman nor the man made more than the 
work. " But were I joined with her," cries Arthur, 

" Then might we live together as one life, 
And reigning with one will in everything 
Have power on this dark land to lighten it, 
And power on this dead world to make it live." 



270 Tennyson 



This is the ideal of marriage laid down in The Princess^ 
and consistently supported through all the Idylls of the 
King ; and herein is the emotional side of Arthur. 

But his spiritual side is also sketched. He has dim 
dreams and visions, like the prince in The Princess^ 
during which the outward world fades away. Strange 
and mystic powers from the unseen world stand round 
about him. He moves in God and in eternity while 
yet on earth ; and in these hours all phenomena are mist 
and dream. The mighty warrior on whom it seems to 
his knights the fire of God descends in battle ; the great 
ruler who is to the world's work as the glove is to the 
hand, cries in the spiritual hour when this solid earth is 
as a vapour, and in words worthy of a great poet — 

O ye stars that shudder over me, 
O earth that soundest hollow under me 
Vext with waste dreams ! 

Then the allegorical side of him is sketched. His 
senses are so exalted that he sees the morning star 
at noonday ; he comes from the great deep and goes to 
it again ; he is made king by immortal queens ; he is 
not doomed to death but to return and live again. The 
sword he wields blinds the eyes of men ; the city he 
lives in and the great hall of his knights is built by the 
intellectual and spiritual powers. 

Half, then, of this world, half of the mysterious 
world beyond, Arthur has the qualities of both, and 
does his work in both with equal steadiness and fire. 



Idylls of the King 271 

As such, he smites his own spirit into those who love 
him, so that, when his knights swear allegiance, into 
every face there comes 

A momentary likeness of the king. 

So carefully, and with such foresight for the rest of the 
poem, is Arthur hewn out before us by the poet. 

But another personage needs also to be introduced : 
Lancelot, friend of the King, yet the lover of the 
Queen. He first appears with Arthur in the battle for 
Arthur's rights with the rebellious kings. They each 
save one another's life, and they swear on the stricken 
field a deathless love : 

And Arthur said : " Man' sword is God in man ; 
Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death." 

Alas ! in the trust, and in the friendship, lies hidden 
all the tragic fate to come ; and when we hear that 
Lancelot is sent by Arthur to fetch Guinevere, we know 
that the joy, splendour, and hopes of the King are already 
doomed. The rift is in the lute which will make all the 
music dumb. What faith has bound together, unfaith 
unbinds. O tragic world and tragic life of man ! Ten- 
nyson has lifted to the highest peak in this poem the early 
inspiration of the King and his people, that our pity may 
be wrought to fulness by the catastrophe. Only a hint 
here and there suggests the pain to come, but the hints 
are clear. There is admirable skill shown in the manage- 
ment of this. 



272 Tennyson 



Thus the characters are placed in preparation for the 
whole. The story, as story, is set afloat by the ques- 
tions of Guinevere's father concerning Arthur's birth. 
Is he a lawful king or not ? Arthur's knights tell 
Leodogran the old legend of Uther and Ygerne and 
the siege of Tintagil. Thus Tennyson keeps touch 
with the tale which is his basis ; but after that, for the 
sake of his allegory, he invents, and Bellicent tells the 
story of Arthur's coronation, and the mighty oath by 
which the soul binds all the powers of man to follow 
him in purity to redress the wrongs of the world. In 
the midst there arises that fine vision of the Church as 
the Lady of the Lake — a splendid picture, in which 
every word is a symbol : 

A mist 
Of incense curl'd about her, and her face 
Well-nigh was hidden in the minster gloom ; 
But there was heard among the holy hymns 
A voice as of the waters, for she dwells 
Down in a deep ; calm, whatsoever storms 
May shake the world, and when the surface rolls, 
Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord. 

Then, to restore the humanity of the tale, Arthur's 
youth with his half-sister, Bellicent, is pictured — one of 
Tennyson's homely pictures of domestic tenderness ; 
and then, lifting himself easily into more exalted 
thought, he invents the magic story which signifies the 
coming of the soul into this world from the high heaven 
and out of the great deep. The allegory may be let go, 
but the description of Merlin and Bleys, descending 



Idylls of the King 273 

while Uther is dying to the cove below Tintagil Castle, 
is a piece of noble poetry — half nature and half legend : 

And then the two 
Dropt to the cove and watch'd the great sea fall, 
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last, 
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep 
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged 
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame : 
And down the wave and in the flame was borne 
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet, 
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried " The King 
Here is an heir for Uther ! " And the fringe 
Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand, 
Lash'd at the wizard as he spake the word, 
And all at once all round him rose in fire, 
So that the child and he were clothed in fire. 
And presently thereafter follow'd calm. 
Free sky and stars. 

Scarcely less fine than this is the dream of Leodogran, 

and the description of the great church in the Maytime, 

and the stainless knights in white robes, upon the 

wedding morn — with the one torch, in which so much of 

tragedy is held, of the drooped eyelids of Guinevere, in 

whose heart lay Lancelot while her hand was clasped in 

Arthur's. Lastly, as a piece of glorious literature, there 

is the marriage and coronation song of the knights. It 

was not in the first draft of The Coming of Arthur. It 

embodies the thought of the poem, grips the whole 

meaning of it together. And its sound is the sound of 

martial triumph, of victorious weapons in battle, and of 

knights in arm.s. We hear in the carefully varied chorus, 

in the very rattle and shattering of the vowels in the 
18 



2 74 Tennyson 



words, the beating of axe on helm and shaft on shield. 
Rugged, clanging, clashing lines — it is a splendid effort 
of art. King Olaf might have sung it. 

Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May ; 
Blow trumpet, the long night hath roll'd away ! 
Blow thro' the living world — " Let the King reign." 

Shall Rome or Heathen rule in Arthur's realm ? 
Flash brand and lance, fall battle-axe upon helm, 
Fall battle-axe, and flash brand ! Let the King reign. 



Blow, for our Sun is mighty in his May ! 

Blow, for our Sun is mightier day by day ! 

Clang battle-axe, and clash brand ! Let the King reign. 

The King will follow Christ, and we the King 
In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing. 
Fall battle-axe, and flash brand ! Let the King reign. 

We hear its contrast in Merlin's song, as soft and flow- 
ing as the other was braying and broken, and we think 
with gratitude of the artist who could do both with 
equal ease. The graciousness of the rivulet-music and 
soft play of Nature is in the lines of this delicate song, 
and the gaiety of youth ; and mingled with these the 
deep and favourite thought of Tennyson of the pre- 
existence of the soul. It is pleasant to hear it, for we 
have companied with the shadow of tragedy : 

Rain, rain, and sun ! a rainbow in the sky ! 
A young man will be wiser by and by ; 
An old man's wit may wander ere he die. 



Idylls of the King 275 

Rain, rain, and sun ! a rainbov/ on the lea ! • 
And truth is this to me and that to thee ; 
And truth or clothed or naked let it be. 

Rain, sun, and rain ! and the free blossom blows ; 
Sun, rain, and sun ! and where is he who knows ? 
From the great deep to the great deep he goes. 



In The Coining of Arthur the King is crowned and 
married, and the land subdued to peace and justice. 
The heathen and the Romans are driven out ; the 
Round Table established. Arthur sits on the judgment- 
seat, and there is a sketch of him in Gareth and Lynette 
doing this work. Knights ride away each day from the 
Court to deliver the weak from the oppressor ; and the 
young men of noble birth in the kingdom whom Arthur's 
character has inspired come, like Gareth, to Camelot to 
join his band, seeking knighthood and high adventure. 
So everywhere the Order is recruited, the King's power 
grows, and into all the knights, young and clean and 
eager, the King pours his spirit : 

Clear honour shining like the dewy star 

Of dawn, of faith in their great King, with pure 

Affection, and the light of victory. 

And glory gain'd, and ever more to gain. 

All is well ; and the idyll of Gareth and Lynette repre- 
sents this golden time. In human affairs, in the history 
of great causes, in men's lives, in their love, there is a 
time of glad beginnings, such a beginning as Nature has 
in spring. Gareth is the image of this pleasant, pro- 



276 Tennyson 



phetic time* He is also the image of the Arthurian 
kingdom in its youthful energy, purity, gentleness, ideal- 
ity ; he is moreover the incarnation of the vigour, cour- 
age, gaiety, and audacity of youth. Nothing seems 
impossible to the King and the Round Table ; nothing 
seems impossible to Gareth. When we are young, noth- 
ing seems impossible to us. '' Madam," Youth says to 
Mother Nature, " there is no such thing as the impossi- 
ble." Then Nature smiles, for she loves the bold ; 
nevertheless, she strikes hard. If we are gay when we 
are smitten, she is on our side. We get our way for a 
time, and do what all the world says cannot be done. 
But if our courage fade at her stroke, or we take it 
sullenly, she frowns in scorn and tramples us beneath 
her feet. 

Gareth was one of these bold, gay creatures. He did 
not mind being a kitchen knave, nor the taunts of Sir 
Kaye, nor the mocking of Lynette ; and when Lancelot's 
spear hurled him to the ground, he broke out into frank 
laughter. Nor was he one whit daunted by the magic 
horrors of Night and Death. Fools of pageantry he 
thought them, and fools they are. The soul that laughs 
and loves and rides for the right, has the world at his 
feet while he is young. 

Something of this was in the mind of Tennyson when 
he invented and added to the story the symbolism of the 
knights that defended the fords of the river. The first 
was the Morning-Star, the second Noon-Sun, the third 
the Evening-Star, the fourth Night and Death. One by 



Idylls of the King 277 

one they are overthrown by Gareth. His youth laughs 
at the attack which the temptations of youth, of middle 
age, of the evening of life, of death, of Time itself, make 
on men — that long, wrathful siege of battering days. 
Tennyson marks this meaning. In the carved allegory 
(a thing he has invented) near the hermit's cave, the 
rock bears five knights with the names Phosphorus^ 
Meridies, Hesperus^ Nox^ and Mors sculptured beneath 
them, and they are running down the soul — 

A Shape that fled 
With broken wings, torn raiment, and loose hair 
For help and shelter to the hermit's cave. 

It is ** the war of Time," he says, '' against the soul of 
man." But Gareth conquers all of them by audacity 
and gaiety. The encounters in this pageant are alike 
clear, varied, brief, set each in its own fair landscape, 
and the sound of the river accompanies them with 
warlike music. They are real enough, but they are 
also allegorical. It is easy for the faith and boldness of 
youth to conquer the sins and troubles of the dawn of 
life ; it is harder to slay those of its noonday ; it is 
harder still to overcome those of its late afternoon ; and 
Tennyson's representation of the Knight of the Evening- 
Star is full of original thought. He is old and hard ; he 
blows a hard and deadly note upon his horn. A storm- 
beaten, russet, many-stained pavilion shelters him. A 
grizzled damsel arms him in ancient arms. Beneath 
his arms a hardened skin fits close to his body. All 
is different from that which the commonplace imagi- 



278 Tennyson 



nation connects with the evening star. We see the poet's 
meaning by the comparison he makes to illustrate the 
difficulty of Gareth's battle against the Knight of the 
Evening-Star : 

Till Gareth panted hard, and his great heart, 

Foredooming all his trouble was in vain, 

Labour'd within him, for he seem'd as one 

That all in later, sadder age begins 

To war against ill uses of a life, 

But these from all his life arise, and cry, 

" Thou hast made us lords, and canst not put us down ! " 

Nor is the representation of Night and Death, both of 
whom one champion images, less imaginative. The 
black horse, black banner, and black horn, the black 
armour painted with the white skeleton and helmed with 
the skull, are the ordinary thing. But the thunder gloom 
under which he rides, the chill of his aspect which 
strikes ice even into Lancelot, his huge pavilion which 

Sunders the glooming crimson on the marge, 

lift the work Tennyson does beyond the ordinary. And 
finally we reach thought, symbol, and full imagination 
together, when (the skull cloven by Gareth and then the 
helm) there issues forth from the black terror and the 
deadly chill the bright face of a blooming boy, " fresh as 
a flower new-born." It is Tennyson's view of Death, it 
is also his image of what it seems to youth, to gaiety, to 
daring, and to faith. And the story ends with the preg- 
nant line : 



Idylls of the King 279 

So large mirth lived, and Gareth won the quest. 

All this part of the tale is vivid with pictures, touched 
with happy illustrations drawn from Nature,* and stead- 
ily builds up into fulness the character of Gareth. But 
the beginning is not so well done. The scenes between 
Gareth and his mother, who strives to keep him under 
her wing, are much too long, and the mother's dulness 
of perception when Gareth places, in two illustrations, 
his position before her, and her last argument, that 
the King may not be the true King, and therefore Gareth 
must stay at home, are quite out of nature. It is not till 
Gareth escapes, and is on his journey to Lancelot, that 
Tennyson recovers himself. And he does recover him- 
self admirably in his description of Camelot, and the 

* Here are a few of these illustrations. Gareth cannot wholly 
overthrow the Evening-Star, no more 

Than loud Southwesterns, rolling ridge on ridge, 
The buoy that rides at sea, and dips and springs 
For ever. 

This also of the honeysuckle that flies about the cave : 

Good lord, how sweetly smells the honeysuckle 
In the hush'd night, as if the world were one 
Of utter peace, and love, and gentleness, 

might have been said by Jessica in the night scene in Portia's garden. 
Take two others. The first likens the cloth of gold M'hich Mark 
sends to Arthur to 

A field of charlock in the sudden sun 
Between two showers. 

That is as quick-eyed as it is simple and true. See how the poet, to 
make our sight of the thing more brilliant, puts in " Between two 



28o Tennyson 

mystic gate, and the magic music, and the visionary im- 
pression that the city makes upon the imagination, and 
the meeting with Merlin. It is fine invention, and many 
a line is worth a magic spell. 

Lastly, the first of the types of womanhood that Ten- 
nyson draws in the Idylls is Lynette, a fresh and frank 
young person, smart and thoughtless, quick-tongued, 
over-rude, over-bold both with the King and with Lan- 
celot, but honourable and pure of heart — the petulant, 
impatient type. Such a woman may be charming, but 
Lynette's sauciness wants charm, just because too much 
of the masculine roughness of Tennyson speaks in her. 
I do not allude to her rude scorning of Gareth as the 
kitchen-knave and her unsavoury mocking of him, for 
all that is taken directly from the original story ; but to 
the way in which Tennyson has expressed it, especially 

showers," just as in the next his imagination makes the plant feel its 
own fate. 

Wan-sallow as the plant that feels itself 

Root-bitten by white lichen, 

Gareth drops his cloak, and breaks bright in arms, like those 

Dull coated things, that making slide apart 
Their dusk wing-cases, all beneath there burns 
A jewel] 'd harness, ere they pass and fly. 

And the shield of the Noonday — 

As if the flower. 
That blows a globe of after arrowlets. 
Ten thousand-fold had grown, flashed the fierce shield, 
All sun. 

These come out of the full treasury Tennyson had collected in his 
mind of the precious sights of Nature. 



1 



Idylls of the King 281 

to his attempt to give it a humorous turn. Lynette in 
Malory's hands is entirely in earnest, and her character is 
throughout consistent. She repents of her abuse, but she 
has no humour, and she has no delicate sentiment. But 
in Tennyson's hands we cannot quite tell whether she is in 
earnest or not, and what humour there is attempted is like 
that of an undergraduate.* Lynette, overdone in this way, 
is more a study of the saucy type of woman than a real 
woman. Moreover, when Tennyson wants to improve 
her, and shows fineness of nature in her, he divides her 
from herself. She becomes full of sentiment, and when 
she sings those charming little songs which one by one 

*Itis curious that a poet, whose humour is so excellent in 
The Northern Farmer, and the other dialect poems, should fail so 
completely when he tries to be humorous in the Idylls of the King 
and in the Dramas. When, for example, Geraint is irritated by the 
villagers who answer all his questions by talking of the knight who 
calls himself the Sparrow-hawk, he cries : 

A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk ! 

Tits, wrens, and all wing'd nothings peck him dead! 

Tennyson means him to be spleenfully humorous, and he is only 
absurd. When in the next two lines he leaves humour alone, he is 
excellent. Geraint cries out : 

Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg 

The murmur of the world ! What is it to me ? 

Then he tries to be humorous again : 

O wretched set of sparrows, one and all. 
That pipe of nothing but of sparrow-hawks ! 

This is ridiculous on the lips of a stately knight. The only explana- 
tion I can make is that the solemn vehicle of heroic blank verse, and 
especially of blank verse so elaborate and academic as that of the 
Idylls of the King, is wholly unfitted for the expression of humour. 



282 Tennyson 



embody the change of her view of Gareth, they are 
over-delicate for her previous character. We cannot fit 

O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain, 
O rainbow with three colours after rain, 
Shine sweetly : thrice my love has smiled on me, 

with a voice like this : 

Dish-washer and broach-turner, loon ! — to me 
Thou smellest all of kitchen as before. 

Malory does not make that mistake. Lynette is one 
woman in his hands. In Tennyson she is two, and the 
two do not agree. 

I cannot make the same criticism with regard to Enid, 
whose character fills the next two Idylls, The Marriage 
of Geraint and Geraint and Enid. Enid is one woman, 
both as girl and wife. As Lynette is the type of petu- 
lance, so Enid is the type of patience. She is Tenny- 
son's Griselda. Lynette is audacious and free of tongue. 
Enid is silent in endurance of wrong. She is silent also 
when she ought to speak. She is afraid to blame Geraint 
for his sloth, because she knows he is slothful from love 
of her. And her fear, falling in with Geraint's suspi- 
ciousness, makes the trouble of the piece. Patience, 
when it is accompanied by fear or over-fancy, is turned 
from doing good to doing wrong. But, independent of 
this evil side of patience, Tennyson seems to like this 
kind of womanhood. Of all his women, Enid is the 
most carefully drawn, the most affectionate. She is 



Idylls of the King 28 



J 



gracious, but she is one of those women who do a great 
deal of harm to men. The defects of their patience 
make in men tyranny and selfishness, jealous overbear- 
ing and ugly suspicion. In bad men these evils grow 
worse, till the man turns into a brute. In a suspicious 
but noble-hearted man as Geraint originally was, they 
produce, and often with startling suddenness, detestable 
conditions of mind and life, out of which men like 
Geraint, being good at root, are shocked back again into 
self-knowledge and repentance. 

This effect, however, is overdone by Tennyson. It 
would be difficult to find, outside of bad men, any one 
whose conduct is made more odious than Geraint's. 
Tennyson could not have recognised how far apart he 
wanders from what we call honour, nor do I think that 
his conduct is sufficiently motived from the point of 
view of art. Only the madness of jealousy, and not mere 
suspicion, is enough to partly excuse all he thought and 
all he did. He is not even represented as having suffi- 
cient cause for his conduct. He is expressly said not to 
believe in Enid's loss of honour. Moreover, from the 
very beginning he is not quite a gentleman. A few days 
before his marriage, he doubts Enid's affection for him ; 
he wishes to prove her obedience, to test whether it is 
love for him she has, or desire for the splendours of a 
Court. If she will at a word, without reason given, come 
in her shabby dress to Court, then he will rest, fixed in 
her faith. 

What sort of a man is this ? He, at least, does not 



284 Tennyson 



know what love means ; lost in himself, in vanity and 
suspicion. There is nothing of this suspicion in the 
original story. Geraint there is, like Leontes, suddenly 
attacked by jealousy and its special anger when he hears 
his wife say that he is not the man he was. And this 
furious jealousy motives his rude conduct. Jealousy 
maddens, and the Welsh writer, careful for his hero's 
repute, expressly says that for the time he was insane. 
But Tennyson does not make Geraint jealous in this 
way, nor put him into the madness of jealousy. He is 
only suspicious and angry, and his conduct to Enid, far 
worse than it is in the original, has not cause enough at 
the back of it to make it possible. The position is over- 
done. Nor does Tennyson's short introduction to the 
second part in Geraint and Enid — 

O purblind race of miserable men, 
How many among us at this very hour 
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves 
By taking true for false, or false for true — 

give a sufficient reason for the meanness of Geraint. 
Many men, indeed, lose the use of life in that fashion, 
but if they are of noble nature, as Geraint is represented 
at first, they do not fall so low as he, they do not quite 
dishonour their original character, they do not lose all 
chivalry to a woman. Or if they do, they do it because 
they believe their wife to be utterly false to them. This 
cause is excluded by Tennyson. Geraint falls too low, 
and his fall has not sufficient motive. Art has failed 
Tennyson. 



Idylls of the King 285 

When the rumour about the Queen and Lancelot comes 
to Geraint's ear, he thinks that his wife may suffer taint 
because she is the Queen's friend, and he removes her 
from Court. Then he forgets all his duty and his fame 
in uxorious love of her. He fights no more ; he lets his 
province fall into confusion. This is natural enough, 
and though he is suspicious and feeble, he has not yet 
altogether lost gentlehood. Men laugh at him for his 
weakness. His wife saddens, and seeing her sad, his 
base suspicion that she is tainted deepens. He hears 
her murmuring one morning that she is no true wife, 
and leaps at once to the conclusion that she is not faith- 
ful in thought to him, bursts out into a reckless passion, 
and bids her ride into the wilderness with him — utterly 
careless of her, careful only for himself. When he meets 
the first three bandits, and she warns him, he cries : " If 
I fall, cleave to the better man " — an odious insult. In 
the midst of all this wrath, he eats like a man who has 
no trouble, and jokes at the mowers whom he has de- 
prived of their dinner. When Limours (Enid's old 
lover) comes into the inn, and, seeing Enid alone, asks 
leave to speak to her, Geraint answers : 

My free leave, 
Get her to speak ; she doth not speak to me. 

This is partly in the original, but what follows is not. 
While Enid sits in the room, Limours drinks and jests 
and tells loose tales. Geraint is pleased, and bursts into 
laughter ! Then it is that he gives Limours leave to tell 



2 86 Tennyson 

his wife of his love to her. What ensues is still worse. 
Limours is slain next morning, and Geraint (though it 
is Enid herself who has asked Geraint to defend her 
from his pursuit, though he has himself almost handed 
Enid over to Limours) calls Limours her lover. These 
vilenesses are added by Tennyson to the Geraint of the 
old tale. There is not a trace of the gentleman left in 
Geraint. Limours is twice the lover and twice the 
gentleman. 

All this is overdone. It is impossible a gentleman 
could fall so low. It is also quite out of character with 
the days of chivalry in which the original story took its 
form. Moreover, as I said, the motive is not sufficient. 
Nor is Arthur's reproof to him sufficient punishment. 
His punishment ought to come in Enid's ceasing to love 
him. But Enid is not of that temper. She continues to 
love him ; but I wonder, even with her, whether in the 
future there was not some mild contempt mingled with 
her love. There would have been if Geraint fell as low 
as Tennyson makes him fall. Enid's love, after Geraint's 
conduct, is even more improbable than Griselda's. 

Independent of this main criticism, the poem is well 
wrought and full of beauty. The story is skilfully intro- 
duced, continued, and ended. The pictorial passages, 
and these are brilliant, are full of many happy touches 
of light and colour, happy asides of sentiment, vs^ith 
epigrams of wisdom and thought scattered among them 
like jewels on a golden robe. There is no weariness as 
we read : the eye sees something new, the ear hears 



Idylls of the King 287 

some fresh sound, the heart and brain are stimulated 
from Hne to line. The work is delightful throughout 
from this point of view — concise, chosen, and luminous. 
We wish nothing out of, and rarely anything into the 
descriptions. There is no modern poet who has painted 
his landscapes in fewer words, and yet who painted 
all that was needful to make the scene, as far as he 
chose to see it, leap out before the eyes : 

So thro' the green gloom of the wood they past, 

And issuing under open heavens beheld 

A little town with towers, upon a rock, 

And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased 

In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it ; 

And down a rocky pathway from the place 

There came a fair-hair'd youth. 

He has rejected every unnecessary detail. I think he 
has rejected too much of his original, which I give 
below, but he is judge.* At least, he has carefully kept 
the human figures. The mowers mowing, the youth 

* Here is the original in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of 
the Mabinogion : " And early in the day they left the v/ood, and 
they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand, and 
mowers mowing the meadows. And there was a river before them 
and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up 
out of the water by a lofty steep, and there they met a tender strip- 
ling, with a satchel about his neck, and they saw that there was 
something in the satchel, but they knew not what it was. And he 
had a small blue pitcher in his hand and a bowl on the mouth of the 
pitcher. And the youth saluted Geraint," etc., etc. 

That this is more alive, that there is more of the witchery of rep- 
resentation in it than Tennyson's lines, illustrates what is elsewhere 
said of the loss sometimes in his natural description of charm, and 



288 Tennyson 



descending the path, strike forth the landscape. From 
1842 onwards, indeed earlier when that brilliant appari- 
tion of Paris in (Enone issues from the wood, Tennyson 
rarely painted a landscape without humanity, and he 
places his figures with all the skill of a painter. He 
knew that Nature alone was not half as delightful as 
Nature and man together. Lover of Nature as he was, 
he avoided the crowning fault of modern poetry — the 
unmitigated merciless description of Nature, trickling 
on for fifty and a hundred lines together, without one 
touch of human interest. He knew the great masters — 
Homer, Virgil, and the rest of these who see and feel at 
the same moment — too well to fall into that dreary error. 
He was too much of a great master himself to com- 
mit it. It is from this impassioned mingling of the soul 
and sight of man with the soul and sight of Nature that 
the specialised loveliness arises which charms us, and 
dignifies itself, in the descriptions of Tennyson. There 
is no finer example of this than in Geraint's first sight 
of Enid. We see the castle courtyard, the ruined tow- 
ers, with all their grass and flowers and ivy, as with the 
naked eye. But in the midst we see Geraint and Yniol, 



especially of livingness, from too great a devotion to conciseness. 
The river is gone, and the horses bending to drink ; and the river is 
the living spirit of the landscape. I am sorry also to lose my curi- 
osity about the satchel. Above all, why have left out the eye of the 
picture, and in colour too ? How could he leave out the blue pitcher? 
Tennyson had no intense love of colour. He was no Venetian. 
Black and white were his favourite vehicles. Few of his shadows are 
in colour. 



Idylls of the King 289 

and then we hear Enid singing and the castle court is 
filled with her. Nothing can be closer to nature than 
these lines, which describe the ivy climbing the castle ; 
every word is alive with fact : 



And monstrous ivy-stems 
Claspt the gray walls with hairy-fibred arms, 
And suck'd the joining of the stones, and look'd 
A knot, beneath, of snakes — aloft, a grove. 



Wordsworth would have given a life of its own to that, 
but Tennyson draws it only as it is, leaves it, once he 
has brushed it in, and passes on to fill the ancient court 
with youth by Enid's voice, and to make her voice 
awaken fatherly love in Yniol's heart and passion in 
Geraint's. They stand still, enthralled, looking up, and 
listening. And Enid sings that song of fortitude in 
poverty, of the mastery of the soul in good or evil fort- 
une, which is so finely written that it speaks the very 
soul of enduring manhood and womanhood all over 
the world.* There is as much strength as there is 
beauty in the whole scene ; and the two comparisons of 
the effect on Geraint of Enid's voice are one of the 
noblest instances we can give of that sweet keen deli- 
cacy in Tennyson which, in contrast with his bluff power, 
is so pleasant a surprise. Let me quote the passage : 

* The motive comes from Dante ; but with what grace and beauty 
it is varied and enhanced ! The soul of the girl is in it, and the 
soul of the situation. And it fits, enlightens, strengthens, and con- 
soles those everywhere who are in a similiar condition. 
19 



290 Tennyson 

And while he waited in the castle court, 

The voice of Enid, Yuiol's daughter, rang 

Clear thro' the open casement of the hall, 

Singing ; and as the sweet voice of a bird, 

Heard by the lander in a lonely isle, 

Moves him to think what kind of bird it is 

That sings so delicately clear, and make 

Conjecture of the plumage and the form ; 

So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint ; 

And made him like a man abroad at morn 

When first the liquid note beloved of men 

Comes flying over many a windy wave 

To Britain, and in April suddenly 

Breaks from a coppice gemm'd with green and red,* 

And he suspends his converse with a friend, 

Or it may be the labour of his hands, 

To think or say, " There is the nightingale " ; 

So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said, 

" Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me." 

To this first impression of her Enid is true through- 
out. Her patience is too overwrought to permit us to 
class her among the higher types of womanhood — in- 
deed, these very patient women are always painted by 
men — and her own character is sometimes overwhelmed 
by the allegorical representation of patience Tennyson 
makes through her. But when we ignore this, and get 
down, below the type, to her natural womanhood, Enid 
is full of truth and life. When she hears that she is 
loved by Geraint and lies awake all night ; when she 
longs to be beautifully dressed to pleasure her lord and 
do him credit ; when she slips from her couch into her 

* Chaucer also saw these spring colours of the young tree? — 
" Some very red, and some a glad light green." 



Idylls of the King 291 

golden dress, like the star of morn from a bank of snow 
into a sunlit cloud ; when time after time she warns 
Geraint of his foes ; when she is left alone in the bandit 
hall and thinks Geraint is dead, and sends the power of 
her suffering and her nature into the rude crowd, she is 
always of the same strength and gentleness, always sweet 
with a sacred charm, so that we do not wonder that 
Tennyson was so moved with his own creation as to 
write about her some of the loveliest lines he ever wrote 
of womanhood, when once more at home in her Jius- 
band's heart she rides away with him from the savage 
lands : 

And never yet, since high in Paradise 
O'er the four rivers the first roses blew, 
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind 
Than lived thro' her, who in that perilous hour 
Put hand to hand beneath her husband's heart, 
And felt him hers again : she did not weep. 
But o'er her meek eyes came a happy mist 
Like that which kept the heart of Eden green 
Before the useful trouble of the rain. 

And with these lines, beautiful with a paradise of tender- 
ness, I leave these Idylls of Geraint and Enid. 

Balin and Balan^ the Idyll next in order in the com- 
pleted book, was the last published by Tennyson. It 
shows no weariness of hand or brain, no lack of his clear 
conciseness, no want of imaginative presentation either 
of the moods of men or Nature. The blank verse is as 
skilful and robust as ever, only a little more abrupt, less 



292 Tennyson 



flowing than in the earlier Idylls. The subject, however, 
continually demands this abruptness, for Balin is the 
incarnation of natural violence of temper. The intellect- 
ual treatment of the story is as fine as the imaginative. 
If we compare the tale as it is in Malory with Tennyson's 
re-making of it here for the purpose of his allegory, we 
shall understand how acutely, skilfully, and profoundly 
the combining intellect has built up the skeleton of the 
tale before the imaginative passion put flesh upon it and 
sent the blood racing through it. As he painted in 
Geraint suspicion growing into rudeness and meanness, 
and in Edyrn pride, or rather arrogance — and these evil 
things as enemies of the soul of man — so he paints in 
Balin the general idea of furious anger as another enemy 
of the soul. Balin, for Tennyson clings at times to the 
theory of heredity, drew this temper from his father. 
He was begotten in an hour of wrath. He was banished 
from the Table Round for an outbreak of violence. 
He is restored to it by Arthur and begins to learn gentle- 
ness from Lancelot and the King. But his moods, born 
in his blood, leap on him like fiends, and he despairs. 
The gentle temper of the Court is too high for him, and 
he takes to the wild woods again, his rage now turned 
upon himself — the chained rage " which yelpt within 
him like a hound." Struggle after struggle he makes 
against himself ; and well, and with an imaginative ethic, 
these are varied and drawn by Tennyson. The last 
struggle is that which he makes by keeping before his 
eyes the Queen's crown upon his shield. But the good 



Idylls of the King 293 

this is to him is destroyed when he hears from Vivien 
that the Queen is false to Arthur and with Lancelot. 
His two ideals are overthrown. He bursts into frenzy, 
tramples on his shield, and Balan, his brother, mis- 
takes his unearthly yell for the cry of the Demon of the 
Wood. Ignorant of their brotherhood, these two charge 
one another, and both fall wounded to the death. 
Vivien removes their helms, they recognise each other, 
and their farewell is one of the most pathetic things 
which Tennyson has written. 

" O brother," answered Balin, " woe is me ! 
My madness all thy life has been thy doom, 
Thy curse, and darken'd all thy day ; and now 
The night has come. I scarce can see thee now. 
Good-night ! for we shall never bid again 
Good-morrow. Dark my doom was here, and dark 
It will be there. I see thee now no more. 
I would not mine again should darken thine. 
Good-night, true brother." 

Balan answered low, 
" Good night, true brother here ! Good-morrow there ! 
We two were born together, and we die 
Together by one doom : " and while he spoke 
Closed his death-drowsing eyes, and slept the sleep 
With Balin, either lock'd in cither's arm.* 

This study of Tennyson's of Anger is quite original, 
and is made vivid by other characters clustered round it 
which exhibit different aspects of the same passion, of 

* Compare Mrs. Barbauld's 

" Say not Good Night, — but in some brighter clime 
Bid me Good Morning." 



294 Tennyson 



the means to overcome it, and of the powers opposed to 
it. It would be interesting to make a full comparison 
of it with the various Angers of Spenser — with the Wrath 
in the chariot of Pride, with the Furor of the second 
book of The Faerie Queene, with the Frenzy of Pyrochles 
and Cymochles. In Spenser these characters are wholly 
allegorical. In BaH?i and Balan the human element is 
greater than the allegorical. The inevitableness of 
Balin's fate makes the pity of it. The constant love of 
the two brothers is drawn with as much tenderness as 
beauty, and the ethical lesson which is indirectly given 
by their story does not arise from the allegory but from 
their human fates, their sorrow and their love. 

Again, two new elements are introduced into the 
general representation, directly opposed one to the other 
— asceticism in King Pellam, and luxury (in the old 
sense of the word) in Vivien. Pellam, leaving human 
wrongs to right themselves, retires to his castle, lichen- 
bearded and grayly draped with streaming grass — 

A house of bats, in every tower an owl — 

scarcely eats, repudiates his wife, and lets neither dame 
nor damsel enter his gates, lest he should be polluted. 
Tennyson's hatred of asceticism, of monkery, of the 
gloom and curse of it, is here accentuated. It has risen 
far beyond that which he felt when he wrote Simeon 
Stylites. He intensifies it when he represents King Pel- 
lam as taking it up from spiritual conceit and to spite 
King Arthur. Moreover, he attacks the chief evil which 



Idylls of the King 295 

follows asceticism when he makes Garlon, King Pellam's 
son, into the lover of Vivien the harlot, and places his 
lair in a cave, so black that it is like the mouth of hell. 
This horror of asceticism, of all religious views which 
separate men from doing the work of justice and love 
in the open world, is fully developed, but in a different 
way, in The Holy Grail. 

Vivien is the other element, now for the first time 
brought into the whole poem. She is here altogether 
allegorical, the incarnation of that impurity of sense 
which is, in Tennyson's mind, the bitterest enemy the 
soul can have, which more than all else breaks up and 
ruins not only States but also the powers by which States 
are made and held together — ^justice, knowledge, har- 
mony, order, truth, true love, man's energy and woman's 
insight. All go down before her attack, and the next 
Idyll develops her fully. 

Lastly, the descriptive power of Tennyson, which in 
the previous Idylls is concentrated into separate pas- 
sages, is here diffused through the whole. When we 
have finished the Idyll, we see the whole wood — great 
trees, dense underwood, sweet springs, wolf-like caves, 
lonely castles, long avenues of trees, green glades, 
shadowy demons and hoar-headed woodmen in it. It is 
not separately described ; it grows up, as the wood of 
Arden grows before us, from notes of woodland scat- 
tered among the action of the piece ; and a delightful 
example it is of an artist's work. 

There is, however, one little touch of direct descrip- 



296 Tennyson 



tion of Nature in this Idyll which enables me, by con- 
trasting it with Coleridge's image of the same thing, to 
mark out a quality in Tennyson's natural description. 
There is a spring in the wood, and the spring makes a 
clear pool with a sandy bottom. Tennyson looks into 
the spring, and sees the sand leaping up under the water- 
glass, impelled by the fountain jet. Balin and Balan sit 
statuelike — 

To right and left the spring, that down 
From underneath a plume of lady fern 
Sang, and the sand danced at the bottonj of it. 

The thing to be seen is perfectly clear, and no poet in 
the world could put it into a shorter phrase. This is 
Tennyson's brief, concise method, and it has its special 
value. And now let us hear Coleridge telling the same 
story of the spring and the dancing sand : 

This sycamore, oft musical with bees — 

Such tents the Patriarchs loved ! O long unharmed 

May all its aged boughs o'er-canopy 

The small round basin which this jutting stone 

Keeps pure from fallen leaves ! Long may the spring, 

Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath, 

Send up cold waters to the traveller 

With soft and even pulse ! Nor ever cease 

Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance 

Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's page. 

As merry and no taller, dances still, 

Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the fount. 

The comparison of these, for the purpose of saying 
which is the best, would not be fair, for Tennyson, as I 
have said already, refrains deliberately in these stories, 



Idylls of the King 297 

lest the human interest should be overwhelmed, from 
any set description of Nature ; and Coleridge has given 
himself wholly to such description. Nevertheless, the 
two pieces illustrate two methods — the concise and the 
expanded — of describing Nature ; and Tennyson, as he 
grew older, loved and used the concise method more and 
more. We meet very rarely in his later work anything 
like the long description of the land around the town of 
Lincoln in The Gardener s Daughter. It was his way, 
and we are grateful for it ; but, on the whole, I love 
Coleridge's way better. It is more pleasant that the 
piece of Nature we have to see should be dwelt on with 
curious love, coloured as well as outlined, played with 
by the imagination, as when Coleridge turns the cone of 
sand into a fairy's page, as merry and no taller, dancing 
alone. This pleases more, and I feel in it the life that is 
in Nature more than in the other. But Tennyson is no 
less the artist than Coleridge, only he is an artist of an- 
other kind. We should feel ourselves happy to have 
these different musicians of Nature, v/hose varying har- 
monies fit our changing moods ; for it is not by saying 
that one poet is better than another that we shall win a 
good delight for ourselves, or learn how to see or com- 
pany with beauty. It is by loving each of them for his 
proper work, and by our gratitude to them all. 

There are two things which, according to Tennyson, 
break up the Table Round ; which first decay and then 
destroy the work of Arthur. The first of these is the 



298 Tennyson 



lust of the flesh, and the second is mystic-ascetic re- 
ligion. Merlin and Vivien represents the first, and The 
Holy Grail the second. Tennyson expresses in them the 
set of his mind towards two recurring problems of soci- 
ety. He looked, and in the direst light, on the growth 
of sensuality, on the indifference to purity, on the 
loosening of the marriage vow, on the unchaste results 
of luxury of life, on the theory and practice of free love, 
as one of the worst evils, and perhaps the worst, which 
can inflict individual, social, and national life. The sin 
of Lancelot and Guinevere, which he takes care to rep- 
resent as induced by a love almost irresistible and as 
supported by unbroken faithfulness, and which does not 
therefore wholly destroy the noble elements in their 
characters, is nevertheless (though ''the light that led 
astray seemed light from heaven," though every excuse 
that can be made for it is made) the primal cause of the 
ruin that follows. The sin of these two high-placed per- 
sons, however modified in them, initiated and licensed 
an unmodified guilt of a similar kind, and brought with 
it when it was committed by others not as noble as 
Lancelot or Guinevere, lightness of character, loose 
desire, scorn of truth and honesty in the things of 
love, and naturally in other matters ; and, finally, a 
luxurious life, in which the doing of justice and the 
support of good government were neglected for sensual 
enjoyment. 

There is a difference between Lancelot, faithful all his 
life to one love, and Gawain who lightly flies from one 



Idylls of the King 299 

to another all his life ; between Lancelot, whose love 
was mingled with a vast remorse, and Tristram who in 
the Idyll of The Last Tournajuetit has, in the airy cyni- 
cism of free loving, become careless of faithfulness, and 
then uncourteous towards the woman whom he once 
loved so well. Nevertheless, it was not in Tennyson's 
way to finally excuse Lancelot and Guinevere because 
they loved faithfully. He brings all the ruin back to 
them. It is their guilt also which made the invasion of 
the Court by Vivien possible — that is, through their 
love, with all its faithfulness, the lust of the flesh stole 
in, and the whole of society was corrupted. Again and 
again this point is made by Tennyson. No matter how 
seeming fair an unlicensed love may be, no matter how 
faithful and how deep, it ends in opening to others the 
door to sensuality, which itself has no faithfulness, no 
depth, and no enduring beauty. Guinevere is followed 
by Vivien, and Lancelot by Tristram. That is his 
view, and I give it without comment. It is part of 
the ethical message Tennyson chose to set forth for 
our society. 

But the state of things to which he finally brings Ar- 
thur's Court and realm — the state of which Vivien is the 
true queen — is not reached at once. There are reactions 
against it, and such a reaction is described in The Holy 
Grail. It was not a useful nor a permanent reaction, 
though it was a religious one. On the contrary, it did 
as much harm to the State and to Arthur's work as the 
sensualism. But then it would not have done so much 



300 Tennyson 



harm had it not been for the previous existence of the 
sensualism. That had weakened not only individual 
moral power, but the collective force of righteous states- 
manship, so that work for the good of the whole people 
no longer seemed the best and wisest thing. It was bet- 
ter, men who were half repenting of a sinful life began 
to think, to pursue after a mystic and ascetic holiness 
than to live naturally in the present world and strive to 
make it wiser and happier. It was better, or pleasanter, 
to seek for supernatural excitements of religious passion 
than to confirm the good and deliver the oppressed and 
walk humbly with God in the common duties of home, 
society, and the State. This is only another form of 
sensualism, or its probable consequence. The unbridled 
life according to the senses induces a condition both of 
body and mind which cannot do without excitement. 
When, therefore, as in Arthur's realm, there is a reaction 
against sensualism and folk turn to religion, they de- 
mand a religion which replaces the sensual by a spiritual 
thrill, or by the excitement of the miraculous ; which 
revels in the mystic ectasies of ascetic purity ; which 
thinks that human love injures the love of God ; and 
which takes men and women away from their nearest 
duties. 

This, in Tennyson's mind, was a deadly misfortune, 
not only for the spiritual life of the individual, but for 
the civic life of societies. In making this clear, he 
spoke another part of what he conceived to be his mes- 
sage to his time. How far he was right is not the ques- 



Idylls of the King 301 

tion here, but what he thought is. He was of the 
school of Maurice and Kingsley in this matter. He 
deliberately attacked in The Holy Grail^ but with some 
of a poet's tolerance and pity, this kind of piety. He 
allowed the possibility of its truth and fitness in a few 
persons of the temper of Galahad and Percivale's sister. 
He abhorred it in the generality of men and women. 
Its origin was chiefly in the senses, and its end was the 
dissolution of all true work for mankind. This is the 
aim of The Holy Grail. 

Our question now is, In what manner, from the lit- 
erary point of view, has he done this double piece of 
work — this attack on impurity and on ascetic and sensa- 
tional religion ? For the work is not only allegorical, it 
is also a story ; not only symbolic but human. In what 
fashion, then, are wrought, first Merlin and Vivien and 
then The Holy Grail ? 

The conception of Vivien, from the allegorical point 
of view, is always careful and sometimes fine, and keeps 
close to the traditional symbolism of Luxuria. She is 
born of rebellion, that is, of disobedient pride. Her 
father dies fighting against Arthur. Her mother brings 
her forth on the battle-field, and, giving her birth, falls 
dead. She is thus cradled in bloody war, war for which 
there is no greater cause in all history than the lust of 
the flesh. She is also cradled in death : " Born from 
death am I," she says, " among the dead," for sin and 
death are woven together, warp and woof. The first of 
sins in the mind of the ancient Church is pride, and the 



302 Tennyson 

second lust, and death is their child. Milton in his 
mighty symbolism makes Satan, immediately after his 
rebellion, give birth to Sin from his head, and then, 
burning for her beauty, beget Death upon her ; and 
Death, in turn, unites himself in unnatural guilt to his 
mother Sin. This is a horror terrible enough for the 
Titanic imagination of Milton. Tennyson's symboUsm 
falls far below that huge conception ; but then his story 
interfered with his allegory, as his allegory interferes 
with his story. 

Vivien, thus bound up with death, causes physical 
war and death. She also leaves behind her moral 
death in men's souls, and death of law and order in 
States. 

Another symbolic touch is given when she says that 
she was " sown upon the wind." Perhaps Tennyson 
thought of the text, " They that sow the wind shall 
reap the whirlwind " ; but the main thought is the in- 
constancy and fierceness of the lust of the flesh, its veer- 
ing and flittering fancy, its tempest-wrath and fury at 
other times ; and it is in the yelling of the storm that 
Vivien has her way with Merlin. Then she is corrupted 
by Mark, king of Cornwall, whose life and Court are set 
opposite to Arthur's. Injustice, falsehood, cruelty are 
his characteristics, and out of these are born coarse 
cynicism in sensualism, and hatred of pure love. Vivien, 
under his tuition, is shown the truth betimes — 

That old true filth and bottom of the well 
Where Truth is hidden. 



Idylls of the King 303 

Therefore when she hears of the vows of chastity at the 
Court of Arthur, she does not believe that a single one 
of the knights is pure. Absolute unbelief in good is 
part of the mere lust of the flesh. With it is hatred of 
those who differ from herself, and deep hatred makes 
her cruel, fearless, and deceitful. Then, there is noth- 
ing she does so easily as lying, and the lying, combined 
with hatred and unbelief of goodness, causes her to be 
the furious slanderer, or the soft-sliding suggester of 
slander. This is Tennyson's outline of sensuality and 
of its attendant sins. 

This allegorical outline is filled up carefully, and in 
nothing better than in Vivien's sincerity. She makes a 
bold defence of the lust of the flesh being the proper 
god and king of the world. Of this god she is the wor- 
shipper, the priestess, and the missionary. There is a 
song of hers in Balin and Balan which glorifies the fire 
of the appetites and senses. It might have been writ- 
ten for the worship of Astarte, and it is splendidly 
imagined by Tennyson. It sets the sensual side of 
pagan Nature-worship into the keenest contrast with 
the self-control of Christianity. The fire from heaven 
she speaks of is not the holy fire of the pure spirit ; it is 
the fire of that heaven which some have conceived, and 
which consists in the full enjoyment of desire. It is 
this blaze of desire which she sees in all Nature as 
well as in man, and it creates, she thinks, the real beauty 
of the world. Tennyson got to the heart of the thing 
in this exultant pagan song. Take the two last verses : 



304 Tennyson 

The fire of Heaven is on the dusty ways. 

The wayside blossoms open to the blaze. 

The whole wood-world is one full peal of praise. 

The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell. 

The fire of Heaven is lord of all things good, 
And starve not thou this fire wdthin thy blood, 
But follow Vivien thro' the fiery flood ! 
The fire of Heaven is not the flame of Hell ! 

Then turning to her squire : " This fire of Heaven, 
This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again, 
And beat the cross to earth, and break the King 
And all his Table." * 

This is Vivien as she is — honest, true, and bold, con- 
fessing evil and rejoicing in it. The whole sketch of 
her in Balm and Balan is of this strain of triumphant 
daring. Her tale of slander about the Queen is there 
delivered with a ring of conquest in it. Her mocking 
of her boy squire and of Balan has the bravery of a 
Queen of sin. She laughs loud at the fools of knights 
who have cast away their lives when they were goodly 
enough to have " cropt the myriad flower of May." She 
has not only no pity, but active cruelty. Come, she 
cries to her squire, I cannot brook to look upon those 
wounded to the death — leave them to the wolves. 

It is a fine sketch — better, I think, than anything con- 
tained in Vivien and Merli?i itself. In that Idyll Vivien 

* See in The Holy Grail what the Paynim people say to Sir Bors : 

What other fire than he 
Whereby the blood beats, and the blossom blows, 
And the sea rolls, and all the world is warmed. 



Idylls of the King 305 

comes to the Court. She creeps and whispers through it, 
sowing the seeds of slander and of her own impurity. 
She leavens the lowest characters, as Arthur does the 
highest. She fixes the scandal of Lancelot and Guine- 
vere in all men's minds ; and finally flies away with 
Merlin that she may destroy his use and name and fame 
by the spell which consigns him to a living tomb. The 
incarnation of the pure intellect is ruined by the lust of 
the flesh. 

There is no need to tell the story of this Idyll. It 
is excessively disagreeable, but it is chiefly disagree- 
able because its form is ill-conceived. The main 
tale is as old as humanity. It is the tale of knowledge, 
of experience, of philosophy made foolish in old age 
by a woman, that she may gain the glory of a con- 
quest at which she will laugh for a week with the 
young. It is so common that it has formed one of the 
folk-tales of the world. The most famous of these is 
the bridling and saddling of Aristotle by the mistress of 
Alexander, and her riding the philosopher up and down 
the garden paths in the sight of the king. Tennyson 
re-invents this common tale, and his way of doing it is 
open to the gravest criticism. There are noble episodes 
in the poem, passages of fine ethical quality, passages 
of creative imagination ; but as a whole, and especially 
in the conceptions of Merlin and Vivien, it is not only 
in the wrong, but unpleasantly in the wrong. 

Vivien almost ceases to be allegorical, and is repre- 
sented as a woman. She is endurable as long as she 



3o6 Tennyson 



symbolises the Lust of the flesh. We know that in the 
realm of allegory the personification of Luxuria must 
be made devoid of any possibility of good. But when 
Vivien is made a woman, as in this Idyll, she is detest- 
able. Absolute falsehood, unredeemed meanness," mo- 
tiveless malignity," are not found in sane humanity, and 
Vivien is all the three. She is not a woman at all. Not 
even the very worst of her type was ever like her. This na- 
tive inhumanity makes her ways and speeches unnatural, 
and because unnatural, vulgar. All the art of the piece, 
because of this error in form by which Vivien the wo- 
man is confused with Vivien as Luxuria, is not good in art. 
The immense skill Tennyson bestows upon it is wasted. 
The conception of Merlin is equally unnatural. The 
story of an old man allured to his ruin by a young 
woman is in itself almost too disagreeable for art to 
take as a subject ; but if it be taken, it ought to be kept 
within nature ; it ought not to be made revolting ; it 
ought to be excused and made piteous by a kind of mad- 
ness in the man. And this is done in the original tale in 
Malory. Merlin there falls into a dotage ; he is " assot- 
ted " by one of the Ladies of the Lake. Love in an 
old man, the most miserable and cruel of all the forms 
of passion, turns the wise magician into a fool ; and the 
Lady of the Lake, herself quite pure, but weary to death 
of him, works the spell upon him and buries him under 
a rock. This is natural and human, and it Avakens our 
sorrow and pity ; moreover, it excuses the man and the 
woman. But Tennyson has chosen to work it otherwise. 



Idylls of the King 307 

Merlin is not in love ; he only wavers on the verge of 
affection. He has not lost his senses or his sense. He 
is as wise as ever ; he sees through Vivien ; he even hates 
her character, her slander, and her foulness of soul ; he 
suspects she wants to destroy his use and fame and 
name — and yet he yields. Up to the last moment he is 
in full possession of his good sense, and then he is swept 
away by the woman's importunity, by a momentary 
warming of his blood. He is made by this, not an ob- 
ject of pity, but of contempt. Had he been in love, 
he would have been a fool as Vivien calls him ; but he 
would have been assotted, in a dotage from the be- 
ginning. As it is, he is not mad, not a fool, but he is 
suddenly self-degraded. And yet he says nothing base, 
which makes the art of the piece all the worse. The 
conditions and the position are out of Nature ; or, if 
such a thing can be in Nature, it is too improbable for 
art to use as a subject, and too ugly. 

Of course, to make such a conception endurable at 
all, the greatest intellectual skill has to be employed, 
and Tennyson labours at the situation he has invented. 
It is done by the understanding, not by the imagination ; 
for the imagination would refuse to work at this false 
conception. The speeches Merlin and Vivien make are 
concocted, not created. The worst of them are Vivien's. 
Tennyson had some notion of what the man would say, 
but he did not know what the woman — and especially 
this type of woman — was likely to say. His ignorance 
of such women does not make his work better. Never- 



3o8 Tennyson 



theless, in the midst of this main current of the story 
there are islands of noble poetry ; and there are episodes, 
apart from the story, which belong to the pure imagina- 
tion. One part, even of Vivien's representation, is ad- 
mirable. It is her outburst of false tenderness, during 
which she sings the song of " Trust me not at all, or all 
in all," which begins : 

In love, if love be love, if love be ours, 
Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers ; 
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. 

It is the little rift within the lute 

That by and by will make the music mute. 

And, ever widening, slowly silence all. 

This song is excellent in its representation of half-true, 
half-false sentiment, and for the subtle way in which 
the false sentiment in it is made to overtop the true. It 
is all the more excellent when we contrast it with that 
true rendering of Vivien by herself in the song which 
extols the fire of the Pagan heaven. Merlin detects its 
masked untruthfulness, and sets over against it the song 
he once heard sung by a young knight in the early days 
of Arthur's reign, when they projected the founding of 
the Round Table for love of God and men. This is a 
lovely, clarion-versed passage — one of the brilliantly 
invented episodes which occur in this Idyll : 

Far other was the song that once I heard 
By this huge oak, sung nearly where we sit : 
For here we met, some ten or twelve of us, 
To chase a creature that was current then 



Idylls of the King 309 

In these wild woods, the hart with golden horns. 

It was the time when first the question rose 

About the founding of a Table Round, 

That was to be, for love of God and men 

And noble deeds, the flower of all the world. 

And each incited each to noble deeds, 

And while we waited, one, the youngest of us, 

We could not keep him silent, out he flash'd, 

And into such a song, such fire for fame, 

Such trumpet-blowings in it, coming down 

To such a stern and iron-clashing close. 

That when he stopt we long'd to hurl together, 

And should have done it ; but the beauteous beast, 

Scared by the noise upstarted at our feet. 

And like a silver shadow slipt away 

Thro' the dim land ; and all day long we rode 

Thro' the dim land against a rushing wind. 

That glorious roundel echoing in our ears. 

And chased the flashes of his golden horns 

Until they vanish'd by the fairy well 

That laughs at iron. 

A speech of Merlin's follows, on true love and fame, 
and their relation each to each, worthy of the study of all 
men and women, and done in Tennyson's weightiest and 
fullest manner. The more excellent it is in itself, the 
more it reveals the unnaturalness of the main conception. 
That Merlin should so speak, and an hour afterwards 
yield as he yielded, shocks both intelligence and feeling. 
But the speech is not only good ; it is also personally 
interesting. It tells us Tennyson's thoughts about his 
fame, and his desire to have his fame in the use that his 
poetry may be to the world. Merlin's memory of what 
he felt when he looked as a young man on the second 
star in the dagger of Orion, is so particular a recollection 



3IO Tennyson 



that I cannot but imagine that Tennyson is relating a 

story of himself : 

A single misty star, 
Which is the second in a line of stars 
That seem a sword beneath a belt of three — 
I never gazed upon it but I dreamt 
Of some vast charm concluded in that star 
To make fame nothing. 

If this conjecture be true, we see the poet in his youth, 

dreaming of fame and yet controlling his dreams. It is 

Tennyson all over, and this sober self-control, standing 

guard over fervent imagination, is one of the secrets of 

his power. But the most brilliant of the episodes, happy 

in invention, vivid in imaginative treatment, is the story 

Merlin tells of his magic book and of the origin of the 

spell by which he is finally overcome. 

Moreover, in dispraising the drawing of Merlin under 

Vivien's temptation we should not forget to praise the 

drawing of his state of mind at the beginning ; the 

melancholy for himself and the world that fell upon him 

in dark and dim presentiment, and the illustrations 

from Nature by which it is imaged. Merlin before his 

vanishing, and in the prophetic air of death, sees all the 

woe that is to be, all the fates of Arthur's kingdom : 

Then fell on Merlin a great melancholy : 

He walk'd with dreams and darkness, and he found 

A doom that ever poised itself to fall, 

An ever-moaning battle in the mist. 

World-war of dying flesh against the life, 

Death in all life and lying in all love, 

The meanest having power upon the highest, 

And the high purpose broken by the worm. 



Idylls of the King 311 

This is greatly conceived and felt, and equal to it in 
poetic power — one of Tennyson's most subtle and splen- 
did illustrations — is this — 

So dark a forethought roll'd about his brain 
As on a dull day in an ocean cave 
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
In silence. 

The full power of human imagination is added in those 
lines to the business of the sea, and lifts the thing into a 
great nobility ; while in his next illustration of the same 
presentiment he describes exactly what many have seen 
but few observed : 

O did ye never lie upon the shore, 
And watch the curl'd white of the coming wave 
Glass'd in the slippery sand before it breaks ? 
Ev'n such a wave, but not so pleasurable, 
Dark in the glass of some presageful mood. 
Had I for three days seen, ready to fall. 

It remains to say one word of the scenery of the piece 
and of its close. We are in the wild forest of Broceliande 
in Brittany. Great meadows, full of buttercups, fill 
the space between the sea and the huge wood. The 
wood is of ancient oaks ; in it there are glades, and 
sweet springs dropping from the rocky clefts, and fairy 
wells ; and Merlin and Vivien sit near a hollow oak, the 
same, perhaps, that Heine saw. There the storm over- 
takes them, and they refuge in the hollow tree. As the 
lightning leaps and the thunder peals, Vivien flies into 
Merlin's arms and has her way : 



312 Tennyson 



And ever overhead 
Bellow'd the tempest, and the rotten branch 
Snapt in the rushing of the river-rain 
Above them. 

It is a habit of Tennyson's, as I have said before, to 
make Nature reflect the passions of man, and the end of 
Vivien is no exception to this common rule. 

The Idyll of Lancelot and Elaine follows that of 
Merlin and Vivien, Woven in and out of it is the story 
of the development to which the love of Lancelot and 
Guinevere had now attained, and this is one of the best 
and most human pieces of work in the Idylls. I will, 
however, keep it for a more fitting place. The character 
of Elaine herself and her story can be put with brevity, 
and it is not difficult to see why Elaine follows Vivien. 

Elaine is set over against Vivien in the fullest con- 
trast. As the root of Vivien is conscious guilt, so the 
root of Elaine is unconscious innocence. As Vivien 
has the boldness of Hate derived from lust, so Elaine 
has the boldness of Love derived from purity. Vivien 
lives in the dry, clear world of cynicism. Not one 
wavering mist of fancy clouds her cruel eyes — not one 
imagination of love touches her. Elaine lives in a 
world of dim fantasy and all the fantasy is born of love. 
She was happy, not knowing she was happy, till she saw 
Sir Lancelot. Then she loved, and loved for her death. 
She is the Lady of Shalott (Shalott is Astolat) over 
again, but with a tender difference : 



Idylls of the King 313 

Out flew the web and floated wide, 
The mirror cracked from side to side, 
" The curse is come upon me," cried 
The Lady of Shalott. 

Vivien lives, Elaine dies — it is the way of this world. 

But Elaine begins in joy. Lancelot, riding in secrecy 

to the jousts for the diamond, comes to Astolat, the 

castle of Elaine's father, and leaves his shield, since its 

emblazonings would reveal who he was, behind him. 

And Elaine, who having seen him once, has loved him 

at first sight and for ever, keeps the shield in her 

chamber, and with the creative fancy of a maiden, 

weaves histories over every dint and scratch made in it, 

conjecturing when and where : 

This cut is fresh ; 
That ten years back ; this dealt him at Caerlyle ; 
That at Caerleon ; this at Camelot ; 
And ah, God's mercy, what a stroke was there ! 

" So she lived in fantasy" — and a beautiful and true 
picture it is of a young girl's heart ! If the dreams of 
young imagination, as Wordsworth sings, keep pure the 
heart, the pure heart of youth has lovelier imaginations 
than any experience of life can bring, sweeter and more 
varied fantasies than any genius that has sinned and 
sorrowed. But they are always silent. Tennyson has 
seen clearly this beautiful thing. In all his work there 
is nothing truer to womanhood than his picture of Elaine; 
and true to that moment of womanhood so difficult to 
represent, when the girl, suddenly touched by a great 
love, becomes the woman. If here and there the alle- 



314 Tennyson 



gorical element enters into her, it is not obtrusive, and 
it is a comfort to be freed from it. This is a real woman : 
not symbolic, but human. Her blood is eloquent upon 
her cheek ; she lives most keenly when she dies. Her 
movements are thoughts, her thoughts are passions. 
Her dead body speaks. She is a true creation. 

Nor do I know anything in his work more tender 
than her character, her love, and her fate. The tender- 
ness of Tennyson is one of his remarkable qualities — 
not so much in itself, for other poets have been more 
tender — but in combination with his rough power. We 
are not surprised that his rugged strength is capable of 
the mighty and tragic tenderness of Rizpah, but we do 
not think at first that he could feel and realise the 
exquisite tenderness of Elaine. But, no : both are in his 
capacity. It is a wonderful thing to have so wide a ten- 
derness, and only a great poet can possess and use it well. 

Moreover, with the power of delicate tenderness goes 
subtlety of treatment ; and Elaine was exceedingly 
difficult to do with sufficient fineness of touch. Her 
innocent boldness might well have become unmaidenly. 
She does not conceal her love ; she lets Lancelot see it ; 
she strives to make him hers ; finally, she confesses her 
love to him, she will be anything to him — if not his 
wife, to follow him as servant. 

Then suddenly and passionately she spoke : 

" T have gone mad. I love you ; let me die." 

" Ah, sister," answer'd Lancelot, " what is this ? " 

And innocently extending her white arms, 

"Your love," she said, *' your love — to be 3'our wife." 



Idylls of the King 315 

And Lancelot answer'd : " Had I chosen to wed 

I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine ; 

But now there never will be wife of mine." 

" No, no," she cried, " I care not to be wife. 

But to be with you still, to see your face, 

To serve you, and to follow you thro' the world." 

She rises to the very verge of innocent maidenliness in 
passionate love, but she does not go over the verge. 
And to be on the verge, and not pass beyond it, is 
the very peak of innocent girlhood when seized by 
overmastering love. It was as difficult to represent 
Elaine as to represent Juliet ; and Tennyson has 
succeeded well where Shakspere has succeeded 
beautifully. It is great praise, but it is well de- 
served. Moreover, had her love been commonplace, 
if true love is ever commonplace, she might have been 
somewhat injured in our eyes. But the greatness of 
Lancelot excuses her. She loves no young carpet- 
knight, but the noblest ; gaunt with battles without, and 
his face marred with fierce battles within. He wins her 
heart as Othello won Desdemona by telling of glorious 
wars, and few battle-passages are finer than Tennyson's 
rapid and fierce sketch on Lancelot's lips of the twelve 
great battles, and finally of Arthur standing after the last 
fight on the top of Mount Badon : 

High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume 
Red as the rising sun with heathen blood, 

I never saw his like, there lives 
No greater leader. 



3i6 Tennyson 



" Save your great self, fair lord," said Elaine to her 
heart. And next morning he rode away, wearing her 
favour, which her innocent daring asked him to carry, 
and leaving her his shield. When she hears of his 
dreadful wound — 

Through her own side she felt the sharp lance go. 

It is a line of which Shakspere might be proud. When 
Gawain asks for her love, she is not ashamed to tell him 
she loves Lancelot. She cannot rest at home, having 
heard of his wound, and begs her father to let her go 
and tend on Lancelot. It is a lovely passage, and she 
woos her father to her will as sweetly as a bird sings ; and 
then, going, she hears in her heart : 

Being so very wilful you must die. 

And her conviction that she will die of her love excuses 
all her devotion to one who does not care for her. 
When to the world she would seem unwomanly, she is 
most womanly. Certainty of death dissolves conven- 
tions. When she sees Lancelot she utters 
A little tender dolorous cry ; 

and when he kisses her as we kiss a child, it is more to 

her : 

At once she slipt like water to the floor : 

And all her heart's sad secret blazed itself 
In the heart's colours on her simple face. 

And, having tended him into health, she tells her love, 
and he offers her all friendship and its offices. " Of all 



Idylls of the King 317 

this will I nothing," she cries, and, swooning, is borne to 
her tower-room, and Lancelot rides away. All this is 
beautifully, intimately conceived. Nor is her death less 
graciously, less powerfully wrought. These are lovely 
lines which tell of her lonely watch at night : 

Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field 
Approaching thro' the darkness, call'd : the owl's 
Wailing had power upon her, and she mixt 
Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms 
Of evening, and the meanings of the wind. 

And the song that follows, how simply wrought it is, and 
yet how subtly — with the subtlety of long passion's 
interwoven thought : 

Sweet is true love tho* given in vain, in vain ; 
And sweet is death who puts an end to pain ; 
I know not which is sweeter, no, not I. 

Love, art thou sweet ? then bitter death must be : 
Love, thou art bitter ; sweet is death to me. 

love, if death be sweeter, let me die. 

Sweet love, that seems not made to fade away, 
Sweet death, that seems to make us loveless clay, 

1 know not which is sweeter, no, not L 

I fain would follow love, if that could be ; 
I needs must follow death, who calls for me : 
Call and I follow, I follow ! let me die. 

This is almost like a piece out of the sonnets of Shak- 
spere, full of his to-and-fro play with words that are 
thoughts ; with the same kind of all-pervading emotion 
in the lines ; the same truth to the situation and the 



3i8 Tennyson 



character of the singer ; and with Tennyson's deep- 
seated waters of love — which too rarely come to the 
surface — welling upwards in it. That which follows is 
almost at the same level : 

High with the last line scaled her voice, and this, 
All in a fiery dawning wild with wind 
That shook her tower, her brothers heard, and thought 
With shuddering, " Hark the Phantom of the house 
That ever shrieks before a death," and call'd 
The father, and all three in hurry and fear 
Ran to her, and lo ! the blood-red light of dawn 
Flared on her face, she shrilling, " Let me die." 

Then, out of that great passion she entered into quie- 
tude, and set forth her funeral, becoming in her memory 
a little child again. For she remembers how often she 
wished to pass the poplar on the stream, and might not ; 
but now she will, laid in her boat, pass beyond it, dead, 
and so sail with her dying message to Lancelot into the 
very palace of the King. Therefore, this being prom- 
ised her, and saying many beautiful things of trust and 
honour, in innocence and cheerfulness she dies. 

A fair life and a fair death ! It is sorrowful, but she 
had her joy. She loved ; she loved one worthy of her 
love, and her heart made him worthier still. Of him she 
believed no wrong, for in herself there was no wrong. 
Her innocence was more than earth could bear, and it 
was well it was borne away to heaven. None may dare 
to mourn her fate ; it was as blest as the heart of Love 
could make it. There are, like her, rare souls on earth 
so wonderfully fortunate in their fate that our troubled 



Idylls of the King 319 

hearts cannot imagine their happiness ; and she was one 
of these. Our pity is with Lancelot, with Guinevere, 
with Arthur, but not with her. 

The story of the Holy Grail, the Holy Vessel, traces 
its origins back to a remote antiquity. The oldest ele- 
ments of the tale were Celtic (chiefly Irish), and their 
symbolism was not Christian, but heathen. Two sets of 
stories, according to Mr. Nutt, were the starting-point of 
the Grail legend. In the first set a kinsman avenged a 
blood-feud by means of three magic talismans — the 
sword, the lance, and the vessel ; in the second set the 
hero visits a castle under a spell, and finds all its in- 
dwellers fed by a magic vessel, and living by its means 
a prolonged life ; from which fortune or misfortune they 
are freed by the hero asking a question about the vessel. 
When these two tales were mixed up with the tale of 
Arthur, they were thrown together into one story. The 
Grail, the sword, and the lance mingle in this one story 
all the powers they have in both the series of tales. The 
two castles become one castle. But the most important 
amalgamating element (which was sure to run both 
stories into one) was that both the castles — that to which 
the avenger goes to find lance and sword for his work, 
and that to which the hero goes to set free from the spell 
those who are kept immortal by the vessel — are both 
symbols in the original Celtic tales of one and the same 
thing — of the other world, the fairy-land of eternal 
youth. How this single story came to be Christianised 



320 Tennyson 

is a question which still remains under debate. But it 
is plain that when it became Christian in Britain it had 
a local habitation. It had housed itself in Glastonbury, 
where possibly under Welsh rule a small heathen temple 
dedicated to Bran was transformed into a Christian 
church. Bran in Celtic mythology was the ruler of the 
Other World and would have in his charge these talis- 
mans : the sword, the lance, and the cup. When the 
temple became the church, Bran was turned into a saint, 
and his magic gear naturally takes a Christian meaning ; 
and the first notion of the cup and the lance as con- 
nected with Jesus, the feeder of His people, whose blood 
saved them, and whose side was pierced by the lance, 
would then arise. That is, the characteristics of Bran 
the heathen god of the far-off world of eternal youth, 
and the gear that he possessed, were transferred to 
Jesus, and fitted to the story of the Gospel. 

Then an addition to this, and a modification, were 
made from the legend of Joseph of Arimathea in the 
Gospel of Nicodemus, a gospel which had a great vogue 
in England in early English times. A fuller Christian 
import was given to the Grail from the story of Jesus in 
that gospel. The Grail is now the dish used at the Last 
Supper, and that with which Joseph caught the last drop 
of blood which fell from the side or the feet of Christ. 
Joseph, thrown into prison, is supernaturally fed from 
this sacred vessel for forty-two years. 

The next step is when a British legend brings Joseph 
to Britain, and the Grail is laid up at Glastonbury. 



Idylls of the King 321 

Joseph takes the place now of Bran. After his death, 
the Grail is hidden from men, until the destined knight 
appears who is to achieve its Quest. Then its meaning 
further developed. It became the symbol of the might- 
iest miracle of the Roman Church, of the change of the 
body and blood of Jesus into the substance of the bread 
and wine. Thence arose the great and fruitful concep- 
tion of the search for the Holy Grail as the search for 
absolute union with Christ. A few, now and again, 
behold it. It seems a crystal cup with rose-red beatings 
as of a heart in it, and with it is often a platter on which 
bread lies, into which bread a white child smites himself. 
It holds then the body and blood of God. When the 
knights of Arthur see it in the hall, it appears covered ; 
thunderings and lightnings attend it, and the roofs rack 
and rive as it passes by. The heroes leap to their feet, 
and swear that for a year and a day they will take up 
the Quest to see it uncovered. This is only one form of 
the manifold tales of this Holy Quest. A hundred poets 
took it up, and wove round it the romantic adventures 
of a hundred knights. The people loved it for its adven- 
tures ; the Church loved it, for it brought, by means of 
the tale, all the poetic enjoyment of the people into close 
contact with the central doctrine of the Church of 
Rome. 

There is one more thing to say. Before the Grail 
embodied the full sacramental meaning it had, while it 
was yet half heathen and half Christian, Percivale is the 
hero of the Quest ; but when the notion of absolute chas- 



32 2 Tennyson 



tity, of total division from women as the necessity for 
perfect union with Christ, spread far and wide, Percivale 
was not pure enough to achieve the Quest, and Galahad, 
the virgin in body and soul, was invented. A new series 
of tales having Galahad as hero, and glorifying virginity, 
now arose. To this there was one exception. When 
the story of the Grail was used by Wolfram von Eschen- 
bach in Germany, we find Percivale in his pre-eminent 
position ; and Tennyson, in this Idyll, reverts as it were 
unconsciously to the original importance of Percivale.* 
It is Percivale that tells the story — we see Galahad 
through his eyes. Nevertheless it is the virgin Galahad 
alone who in the Idylls fully wins the Quest, who not 
only always sees the Grail, but finally goes with it to 
that spiritual city which is the Christian representative 
of the Welsh Avalon, and also of the Irish Tir-na-nogue, 
the land of undying youth. 

So far Tennyson clings to the ecclesiastical form of 
the tale. But though he accepted the virginity of Gala- 
had as necessary for the achieving of the Quest, the 
spirit of his poem is whole leagues away from the ideal 

* This is a remark of Mr. Nutt in his delightful book on The 
Holy Grail. I have followed his explanation of the development 
of the Grail story— an explanation largely, it should be noted, hypo- 
thetical, owing to the nature of the evidence upon which the student 
must rely. This caution applies with especial force to that portion of 
the hypothesis which assumes the conversion of a heathen Bran into 
the Christian Bron. It may be added, however, that although con- 
siderable research has been bestowed upon the Grail legend since the 
appearance of Mr. Nutt's book (i88S), no alternative hypothesis has 
been propounded that has won the acceptance of scholars. 



Idylls of the King 323 

of the Galahad-romances which glorified a life of com- 
plete spiritual asceticism, and which, conceiving that 
woman was the great plague and evil matter of the world, 
made this hero reject, as deadly to spiritual perfection, 
human love and marriage. 

That was not the ideal of Wolfram in the Parsifal. 
Parsifal in Wolfram's poem is the ideal king who marries 
the woman he loves and completes his life in her, whose 
work is to stay in the world, and to make it better by 
noble government. Tennyson takes this line in the 
Idylls^ but he is plainer than Wolfram, for Wolfram only 
lets us infer his view. Tennyson deliberately sets him- 
self to make an allegory, the meaning of which shall be — 
That ascetic religion, an exciting pursuit of signs and 
wonders, severance from home and from the common 
love of man and woman, and a retreat from the daily 
work of the world into cloistered seclusion or in pursuit 
of a supernatural spiritualism, are, save for a few ex- 
ceptional characters, entirely evil. These things dissolve 
societies, injure human life, and produce the very evils 
they are invented to overcome. The opposite life to 
that, the life of Arthur, is the right life. 

In this modern re-making of the legend of the Holy 
Grail the symbolism of the story is wheeled right round 
by Tennyson. The search for the Holy Grail is a mis- 
take ; an evil, not a good. The true life is to bring 
heaven to earth for others ; the untrue, to seek, apart 
from earth, a heaven for one's self. Nevertheless, like 
the wisest poets who are not intolerant of all theories of 



324 Tennyson 



life but their own, nor ignorant of the variousness of 
man, Tennyson allows that there may be a few for whom 
this virgin, ascetic, spiritual life is fitted, and who per- 
form, in that life, their own special work of representing 
before mankind the ideal Holiness, the immortal quest 
of perfection. And he chooses to put this point in the 
persons of Percivale's sister and Sir Galahad.* 

Percivale's sister is admirably drawn, all the main 
characteristics of the mystic female saint, like Catherine 
of Siena, are embodied in her ; and the picture is made 
by scattered touches given with apparent lightness 
through the story. She was no cold-hearted maid. The 
type of which she is the image has a passionate temper- 
ament : 

■^ I think there is more in it than this. The image of the stainless 
knight, wholly apart from sex and appetite, divided from the ma- 
terial interests of the world, a pure spirit clothed for a time in 
flesh, but the flesh so refined by the spirit that it becomes archangelic 
matter, a terrible crystal of pure love, moving in the supernat- 
ural world, with all its powers round him, while yet on earth — this 
image, independent altogether of ascetic theology, was one of the 
finest "motives " art could have ; and its artistic elements were a 
great part of the reason why it entered the heart of the world and 
lodged there. Wolfram's Parsifal drops to a lower level of art be- 
cause he did not use this ' ' motive. " When Wagner imagined the Fa?- 
sifal, he felt an artist's need of this motive, and he restored this 
other-world purity to Percivale. When Tennyson took up the story, 
he preserved this virgin, spotless ideal of Galahad, even though his 
view of human life and duty was opposed to the ascetic life connected 
with it. He could not miss the dazzling ideal of Galahad as an 
art-subject. The artist, as it were against the man's will, was 
stronger in him than the social moralist. Galahad remains Galahad. 
Tennyson even adds another image of the same conception in a 
woman, in the sister of Percivale. 



Idylls of the King 325 

A holy maid — tho' never maiden glow'd, 
But that was in her earlier maidenhood, 
With such a fervent flame of human love. 

This passion, rudely blunted, turned to an ardent 
longing for union with Christ. In that longing all that 
was earthly in her wasted away, till in her eyes alone 
shone fire, the spiritual fire of holiness that had power to 
awaken in others the same desire : 

And so she pray'd and fasted, till the sun 

Shone, and the wind blew, thro' her, and I thought 

She might have risen and floated when I saw her. 

At last she sees the vision, and she sees it through her 
own high-wrought and delicate passion. It comes, at- 
tended by such music as an ethereal ear might hear — as 
of a silver horn far off, blown o'er the hills, a slender 
sound, unlike all earthly music. And when the Grail 
streams through the cell, the beam down which it steals 
is silver-cold, as the maiden heart that sees it ; but the 
Grail is rose-red ; in it are rosy beatings as of a living 
heart, and the white walls of the cell are dyed with rosy 
colours. Cold to earth, ecstatic to heaven ; it is the very 
vision of a mystic maiden's passionate purity. And the 
verses are fitted to the vision. Then, recognising a kin- 
dred soul in Galahad, she weaves a belt for him out of 
her hair, and speaks to him in the language of earthly 
love, yet there is no earth in it. 

" My knight, my love, my knight of heaven, 
Othou, my love, whose love is one with mine, 
I, maiden, round thee, maiden, bind my belt. 



26 Tennyson 



Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen, 
And break thro' all, till one will crown thee king 
Far in the spiritual city : " and, as she spake. 
She sent the deathless passion in her eyes 
Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind 
On him, and he believed in her belief. 

From point to point, the representation embodies the 
whole type, gathering together into one personality 
many characteristics of separate enthusiasts. 

Galahad is different. He sees the same glory, but he 
does not retire from the world, save in spirit. He is 
still the warrior. He has courage to sit in the " Perilous 
Seat," in which whosoever sits, loses himself. Merlin 
was lost in it, seating himself in it inadvertently. But 
Galahad, claiming loss of self as salvation — and the 
whole passage with Tennyson's spiritual meaning in it 
is his own invention — sits in it of set purpose, crying, " If 
I lose myself, I find myself," and sees the Holy Grail. 
After that, day by day, the thing is always with him : 

" Fainter by day, but always in the night 
T?lood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh 
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain-top 
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below 
Blood-red." 

But it companies with him, not to send him to the 
cloister, but to war. " I rode," he cries, 

' ' Shattering all evil customs everywhere, 
And past thro' Pagan realms and made them mine, 
And clashed thro' Pagan hordes and bore them down, 
And broke thro' all, and in the strength of this 
Came victor." 



'Idylls of the King 327 

His hour has now come to be crowned in the spiritual 
city, and he bids Percivale go with him, and see his 
departure. In conception, in invention, in description 
of invented landscape, and in artistic work, this passing 
of Galahad is splendidly written. It is too long to 
quote in full, too knit together to be spoiled by extracts, 
and too poetic to criticise. It is its own best criticism.* 

This great and lofty vision of the glory of the pure 
spiritual life, refined and thrilled by heavenly holiness 
into full union with the world beyond the sense, and need- 
ing no death to enter into the perfect life, is done as no one 
has done this kind of work since Dante. It is made all the 
more vivid, and its unfitness for the common toil of good- 
ness on this earth is shown, by the contrast which Tenny- 
son immediately makes to it in the daily life of the poor 
monk Ambrosius, who knows nought of marvels, but is 
the providence of the little village near which he lives ; 
who does not understand these unearthly visions, but 

* This beginning I may quote. Whoever has seen, while involved 
in it, a nerce thunderstorm on a mountain-top, and the pine-forests 
below smitten by the quick-gleaming bolt, will know with what extra- 
ordinary truth and force Tennyson has made it. 

There rose a hill that none but man could climb, 
Scarr'd with a hundred wintry watercourses — 
Storm at the top, and when we gain'd it, storm 
Round us and death ; for every moment glanced 
His silver arms and gloom'd : so quick and thick 
The lightnings here and there to left and right 
Struck, till the dry old trunks about us, dead, 
Yea, rotten with a hundred years of death. 
Sprang into fire. 



328 Tennyson 



who pities the men who, having known the sweetness of 
love, surrender it for dreams. His head swims when he 
reads of ecstasies and dreams, and then '' I go forth," 
he says, " and pass 

Down to the little thorpe that lies so close, 

And almost plaster'd like a martin's nest 

To these old walls — and mingle with our folk ; " 

And the delightful description, which follows these lines, 
of the work of this small, comfortable and comforting 
village priest shows not only how Tennyson liked this 
type, but also marks the range of a poet who could, as 
it were in one breath, write the sublime passing of Gala- 
had and, immediately after, this homely, loving sketch 
of a small monk's life in a small world. 

These then, Percivale's sister and Galahad, were the 
two, woman and man, who might attain the vision of the 
perfect love through utter separation from the flesh — 
that is, in the Christian idea, through loss of self. But, 
in attaining it, they were ravished from earth and the 
work of earth. All men and women were as phantoms 
to them. They left behind them the impression of ex- 
celling purity, and that was good ; but it was purity 
severed from humanity, and that was not good. 

But as to the rest of the knights, who made their vow 
to see the vision of the Grail, the greater number failed 
to see, but did not fail to be useless. They " followed 
wandering fires," lost themselves, and were lost to men. 
A few saw something, but not the whole. The vision 



Idylls of the King 329 

comes to each according to the soul of each. Lancelot, 
who has made the vow to seek the vision of pure holi- 
ness and love, while his heart loves his sin, sees the 
Grail covered, but sees it as holy wrath and fire, as swift 
and stern condemnation. That which is sweet and 
gentle to Galahad — the light of which is soft rose, and 
the colour and the music of which is as of a silver horn 
among far hills to the sister of Percivale — is to Lancelot 
a stormy glare, a heat 

As from a seventimes-heated furnace, 

from which he swoons, blasted, and burnt, and blinded. 
We hear how the others fared, according to their character. 
But however the vision came or did not come, the pursuit 
of it, as Tennyson thought, was the ruin of noble associa- 
tion for just government, the contradiction and not the 
realisation of true religion. It breaks up the Round 
Table. The kingdom is left without its defenders, and 
when the remnant return they are exhausted. Their fail- 
ure to reach ideal goodness has made them reckless, and 
drives them into base materialism. That which was 
left of truth and purity in the court lessens day by day. 
Sensuality, in swift reaction from asceticism, has full 
sway, and the fall is rapid. But where then, Tennyson 
asks, is spirituality to be found, where pure holiness, 
and love which beholds the invisible kingdom ? It is 
to be found where Arthur found it, in the midst of 
human life, in honest love of men, in doing our duty 
where God has placed us. 



330 Tennyson 



Arthur, who represents this viev/ of Tennyson, has, 
he says, his own visions. He has more. He sees God, 
not as a vision, but face to face. He does not wander 
on the quest of the Holy Grail, but He whose sacrifice 
of love the Holy Grail embodied is always with him. 
So says the King, and Percivale, less spiritual in his 
ascetic solitude than Arthur, does not " know all he 
meant." For, and I quote the passage, it is Tennyson's 
summing up of all the Idyll and its allegory : 

" Some among you held, that if the King 
Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow ; 
. Not easily, seeing that the King must guard 
That which he rules, and is but as the hind 
To whom a space of land is given to plow. 
Who may not wander from the allotted field 
Before his work be done ; but, being done, 
Let visions of the night or of the day 
Come, as they will ; and many a time they come. 
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth. 

In moments when he feels he cannot die 
And knows himself no vision to himself. 
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
Who rose again : ye have seen what ye have seen." 

So spake the King ; I knew not all he meant. 

I turn now to the literary quality of this poem. I 
have written at large concerning its allegory, because 
this Idyll, unlike the rest, is pure allegory. It does not 
come under the objection I have made to the others in 
which the allegory and the story are mixed together to 
the troubling of both. In this Idyll the story is Tenny- 



Idylls of the King 331 

son's own ; he has invented it for the sake of his alle- 
gory. The form then is excellent, and the excellence of 
the form has acted throughout upon the minor inven- 
tions within the main invention, on the verse, the meta- 
phors, and the details. It is good from beginning to 
end ; and the most unexceptional piece of work that 
Tennyson has done in the Idylls. Criticism has nothing 
to object to ; it is lost in admiration and respect. 

The framework of the tale could not be better con- 
ceived. Sir Percivale who has known the great world 
tells the story to Ambrosius, a simple brother of the 
monastery who knows nothing but his village. This 
invention enables Tennyson constantly to contrast the 
exalted with the simple type of mind, the earth-loving 
with the heaven-loving soul. Again we hear in the 
remarks of Ambrosius the same views as those which 
Arthur held concerning the Quest, given, not in the 
high words of the King, but in the simple thoughts of 
the uneducated monk who loved the daily life of men. 
This was a happy thought of the artist. It leads up to 
and doubles the force of Arthur's view of the matter — 
that is, of Tennyson's decision of the whole question. 

An inner unity is also given to the story and to its 
various episodes, which otherwise would be too uncon- 
nected, by their being knit up into the one tale of Per- 
civale. We never lose the image of the quiet, war-worn 
knight, sitting with Ambrosius in the cloister. Even the 
unity of place is thus preserved. The great adventures 
and the great adventurers, the city of Camelot, the 



00 



Tennyson 



pictured hall and the fierce vision of the Grail that went 
through it, the ride of Percivale, the passing of Gala- 
had, the wild voyage of Lancelot, are all brought into 
the still enclosure where the two peaceful figures sit in 
the sun. There, 

Beneath a world-old yew-tree, darkening half 
The cloisters, on a gustful April morn 
That puff'd the swaying branches into smoke * 
Above them, ere the summer when he died, 
The monk Ambrosius questional Percivale. 

Then, step by step, every episode in order, each illus- 
trating one another, each in its right place to advance 
and clinch the conclusion, the story, or rather the alle- 
gory in the story, flows on with such ease and simplicity, 
that it seems to grow like a tree by its own divine 
vitality. And each episode has the quality, character, 
and power of its chief personage stamped upon it and 
ruling its manner of representation, its invention, its 
wording, and even its rhythm. 

I have quoted enough from the story of Percivale's 
sister and Sir Galahad to prove the splendour of the 
invention. Even when the story is not quite new, as in 
the case of Lancelot's voyage to Carbonek, it is so 

* The stamen-bearing flowers of the yew are covered with an 
abundant yellow pollen, which the wind disperses. Each flower 
sends up its little puff of sulphur-coloured smoke. Thus the pistil- 
bearing flowers which, like small acorns, grow apart from the stamen- 
bearing ones, receive the pollen. This smoking of the yew, which 
belongs more to March than April, seized on Tennyson's observing 
fancy. He added a stanza to In Memoriam in order to use it in the 
poem, [xxxix.] 



1 



Idylls of the King 333 

entirely recast that it becomes a fresh pleasure — recast, 
not only for the sake of the allegory, but also for the joy 
that Tennyson, like a child, felt in the making of high 
romance. I illustrate this by three things in the poem. 
The first of these is Percivale's story of his setting forth 
upon the Quest. Tennyson's object is to show that 
pride in one's self, and its extreme opposite — despair of 
sin, which throws us back on self — alike render the 
life of exalted holiness impossible, because for that we 
must, like Galahad, lose self altogether. 

Percivale starts full of joy in his own bravery, but as 
he goes, Arthur's warning that his knights in this Quest 
are following wandering fires occurs to him, and he drops 
down into despair. Then he sees a series of visions. 
A burning thirst consumes him ; it is the symbol of the 
thirst for union with God. " And on I rode," he cries, 
and I quote this especially for its accurate description 
of Nature — 

" And when I thought my thirst 
Would slay me, saw deep lawns, and then a brook, 
With one sharp rapid, where the C7'isping white 
Flay'd ever back upon the slopiytg ivave^ 
And took both ear and eye ; and o'er the brook 
Were apple-trees, and apples by the brook 
Fallen, and on the lawns." 

And while he drank the brook and ate the apples, all 
fell into dust, and he was left alone, thirsting still, and 
in a land of sand and thorns. It is the symbol of the 
thirsty soul trying to find in the beauty of Nature its 
true home, and failing. Then he sees a woman spin- 



334 Tennyson 



ning at the door of a fair home, and she cries '* Rest here," 
but she and the house fall also into dust. It is the 
symbol of the soul trying to find rest in domestic love, 
and failing. 

Then he sees a yellow gleam flash along the world, and 
the plowman and the milkmaid fall before it ; but One, 
in golden armour, splendid as the sun and crowned, 
comes along — and he too, touched, falls into dust. It is 
the symbol of the soul seeking to be satisfied with the 
glory of the earth, chiefly to be attained in war. Then 
he finds a city on a hill, walled, and a great crowd that 
welcomes him and calls him mightiest and purest ; but 
when he comes near, the city is a ruined heap, and the 
crowd is gone. It is the symbol of the soul seeking to 
slake its thirst by popular applause, and especially in 
the fame of a ruler of men, but all is thirst and desola- 
tion as before ; and then he finds the valley of humility 
and of forgetfulness of his sins in the glory of God's 
love. It is a rich invention, and perfectly wrought. 

The next illustration of this brilliant inventiveness is 
the description of the city of Camelot and of the hall of 
Arthur, and of the streets of the mediaeval town when 
the knights depart on the Quest. The towers, the roofs, 
the ornaments of the town, the sculpture in the hall, 
the great statue of gold with its peaked wings pointing 
to the northern star, the glass of the twelve windows 
emblazoned with Arthur's wars, are all described as if 
the poet had seen them face to face, and with a richness 
which truly represents the gorgeous architecture and 



Idylls of the King 335 

furniture of the old romances. Tennyson has absorbed 
and then re-created all he has read in them. I can 
scarcely praise this work too highly. 

Lastly, there is the story of Lancelot's half- vision of the 
Holy Grail and his drift over the sea to the enchanted 
rock of Carbonek. Its basis is to be found in the old 
tale ; but whoever reads it in Malory's Morte d' Arthur 
will see now imaginatively it has been re-conceived. 
It is full of the true romantic element ; it is close to the 
essence of the story of the Holy Grail ; there is nothing 
in all the Idylls more beautiful in vision and in sound ; 
and the art with which it is worked is as finished as the 
conception is majestic. I will praise it no more, but 
quote a part of it. To hear it is its highest praise. 
Lancelot, torn between his horror of his sin and his 
love of it, seeking the Grail that he might be free from 
his sin, yet knowing that he does not wish to be freed, is 
driven into a madness by the inward battle, " whipt into 
waste fields far away," and beaten down to earth by 
little folk, mean knights — and then " I came," he cries : 

" All in my folly to the naked shore. 

Wide flats, where nothing but coarse grasses grew ; 

But such a blast, my King, began to blow, 

So loud a blast along the shore and sea, 

Ye could not hear the waters for the blast, 

Tho' heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea 

Drove like a cataract, and all the sand 

Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens 

Were shaken with the motion and the sound." 

He finds a boat, black in the sea-foam, and drives in 
it seven days over the deep till it shocks on the castled 



2,2,^ Tennyson 



rock of Carbonek whose " charm-like portals open to 
the sea." Then climbing the steps he passes the lions — 

' ' And up into the sounding hall I past ; 

But nothing in the sounding hall I saw, 

No bench nor table, painting on the wall 

Or shield of knight ; only the rounded moon 

Thro' the tall oriel on the rolling sea. 

But always in the quiet house I heard 

Clear as a lark, high o'er me as a lark, 

A sweet voice singing in the topmost tower 

To the eastward : up I climb'd a thousand steps 

With pain : as in a dream I seem'd to climb 

For ever : at the last I reach'd a door, 

A light was in the crannies, and I heard, 

' Glory and joy and honour to our Lord 

And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail.' " 

Lancelot was not only the greatest knighi ; he proves 
here that he was the greatest singer. 

The story of Pelleas and Ettarre as told in Malory's 
book is natural, simple, and common. The ground of the 
trouble in the tale is also simple. It is the boredom of 
Ettarre. She is wearied of being loved by Pelleas, for 
whom she feels no love. " I have no peace from him," she 
cries. A woman in such circumstances is naturally cruel. 
These are simple lines on which to move a tale ; and the 
Pelleas of Malory is quite an ordinary person and his 
Ettarre not an uncommon character of the Romances. 
The love-tale also has nothing out of the common, but 
it is interesting ; it has the romantic air, and it goes up 
and down between pain and pleasure in an adventurous 
fashion, of which it is agreeable to read in a quiet hour. 



i 



Idylls of the King 337 

I need not tell Malory's tale, for the things that happen 
are much the same as in Tennyson's Idyll, at least as 
far as that place in the tale where Pelleas leaves Ettarre 
and rides away. At that point, Tennyson re-casts the 
story. Pelleas, in Malory's book, departs furious with 
the treachery of Gawain, and equally furious with 
Ettarre, not for her unchastity, but because she has 
loved another than himself. Tortured by these two 
angers, he takes to his bed to die of rage and disappoint- 
ment. He is then found by a Lady of the Lake who 
has pity on him, cures his sickness, replaces his love of 
Ettarre by love of herself ; and in order to avenge Pel- 
leas on Ettarre, bewitches Ettarre into a hopeless love 
of Pelleas. Ettarre, drawn to his bedside, besought for 
the affection she had rejected. Pelleas cried out, 
^' Begone, traitress ! " and Ettarre died of that sorrow. 
Then Pelleas went away gaily with the Lady of the 
Lake. 

There is no moral direction, nor indeed any special 
purpose, in the original tale. It is only a faithful record 
of a piece of human life, quite clearly and simply told. 
But Tennyson, when he took it, had a special aim in 
view, and wrote it afresh with a moral purpose. He 
wanted to represent the luxurious society which precedes 
the downfall of a nation, especially after the failure of a 
religious revival founded on the, supernatural. The 
knights have now returned reckless from their unsuccess- 
ful effort to achieve the Quest of the Grail ; not better 

but worse than before. Religion, they feel, is useless, and 
22 



338 Tennyson 



an ideal life absurb. They had been sensual, now they 
have become cynical. Vivien, the lust of the flesh, the 
enjoyment of the senses alone, is full mistress of the 
world. Ettarre represents this society ; Pelleas repre- 
sents its deadly influence on an innocent heart that be- 
lieves in love, purity, and truth, and their embodiment in 
the King. He finds a world, in which the King is thought 
to be a fool, purity ridiculous, love a lust, and the realm 
of the senses the only realm. Thrown suddenly and 
unprepared into this society, the full force of disillusion 
struck on Pelleas like a storm and sank him in the seas. 
He is the later Gareth of The Idylls. Frank, faithful, 
loving, innocent, he steps into life ; but where Gareth 
is victor, he is victim. The conditions of society 
into which Gareth enters are all on his side. He finds 
life as beautiful and true as he imagined it to be. The 
conditions of society into which Pelleas enters are all 
against him. He finds life the exact contrary of all he 
imagined it to be. 

Gareth's history, the history of Pelleas, are equally 
common stories. When, by long neglect, by long indul- 
gence, a base society is made, the souls and bodies of 
far more than half of the innocent children sent into 
the world are murdered. When society is just and pure, 
simple and loving beautiful things, the children are 
destined to a noble happiness. Those who make a 
world of which the judgment of the pessimist is true, 
are the worst of criminals. Its children, for the most 
part disillusioned like Pelleas, are driven into madness 



Idylls of the King 339 

or cynicism. And cynicism, or rather recklessness of 
everything but of present excitement which is the fore- 
runner of cynicism, is what Tennyson sketches \xvPelleas 
and Ettari'e. Ettarre and her flock of girls laugh at the 
innocence and the love of Pelleas. A grizzled knight, 
they say, who knew the fashion of the world were a 
better companion than this baby — "raw, yet so stale." 
Ettarre promises him her love that he may win the prize 
for her and give her fame, and when she has got her 
jewelled circlet, flings his love away, flings a taunt at 
Guinevere, and leaves Pelleas outside her gates to cool 
his romance. She is the great lady of a debased society 
in which everything ideal is only matter of mockery. 
Such a society lives on the very marge of the incoming 
tide of weariness. It only continues to live by the 
fierceness of its strife to gain, hour by hour, enough of 
light or cruel amusement to keep that tide at bay. 
When Pelleas will not cease to believe in Ettarre, she is 
bored to death, and this turns to wrath, and wrath to hate ; 
and when he endures all, she pushes him out of doors 
in bonds. When he goes, for a moment she knows her- 
self. " He is not of my kind. He could not love me 
did he know me well." But the momentary touch of 
conscience fails when Gawain comes to see her, bringing 
merriment and the manners of the court with him, and 
she is guilty at once with him. This woman is Tenny- 
son's ethical warning against a loose and luxury-bitten 
society, and, as ethics, it is well enough expressed. But 
to bind up these modern warnings with a mediaeval 



340 Tennyson 



tale is to render either the tale or the warnings feeble. 
The naturalism of the story suffers. The allegory eats 
it up. And the allegory suffers, for the ancient story 
does not carry it. 

Moreover the whole Idyll is too plainly a stop-gap, a 
transition tale inserted to represent the kind of society 
which intervened between the religious excitement of 
The Holy Grail and the cynical languor of The Last 
Tournament. It does not seem to have naturally grown 
out of Tennyson's original conception. I conjecture 
this, because there is little in it of the passion of an 
artist. The shaping of the poem is not fully imaginative, 
the work of it seems jaded, and even the verse is inferior 
to that of the other Idylls. When Tennyson attempts 
to rise into passionate expression, as when Pelleas turns 
and shrieks his curse at Ettarre and her harlot towers, 
he becomes only violent without power. Even the 
natural description suffers from the artist's apparent 
want of interest in his conception. That vivid sketch, 
at the beginning, of the wood and of the bracken burn- 
ing round it in the sunlight, cannot keep up its speed 
and fire to the end. Either the poet's memory of what 
he saw played him false, or he did not see the thing with 
his usual clearness. It is like a studio-picture, not like 
one painted in the open air. Nor is there a single piece 
of noble or passionate writing in the whole of it, save at 
the very end, when Pelleas breaks into the hall of Arthur 
swordless, and his ruined life upon his face, and will 
not speak to the Queen when she speaks to him. 



Idylls of the King 341 

But Pelleas lifted up an eye so fierce 

She quail'd ; and he, hissing " I have no sword," 

Sprang from the door into the dark. The Queen 

Look'd hard upon her lover, he on her ; 

And each foresaw the dolorous day to be ; 

And all talk died, as in a grove all song 

Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey ; 

Then along silence came upon the hall, 

And Modred thought, " The time is hard at hand." 

That is finely done ; there is more of gloom and com- 
ing woe in it than in all the cursing of Pelleas. But it 
is alone ; it is the only real good piece of art in this, the 
poorest of all the Idylls, 



The Last Tournament is more a work of art than Pel- 
leas and Ettarre^ though it is by no means up to the 
level, even in form, of many of the other Idylls. It also, 
like its predecessor, has the air of being an afterthought, 
of something inserted to point a moral, not to adorn the 
tale. Since the whole poem is a moral poem, we have 
no right to object that this portion of it points a moral, 
but we have a right to ask that it should seem a natural 
branch of the whole tree. Such a vital connection does 
exist in the first part ; but the second part, the story of 
Tristram, is not much more than a graft, and far too 
plainly a graft. Tristram and his story is scarcely ever 
alluded to in the rest of the Idylls : he has nothing to do 
with the Tennysonian movement of the piece, and his 
story, thus foisted in at the end, is nothing more than 
an illustration of adultery. The form of the Idyll is 



342 Tennyson 



spoiled, and we are forced to place it on the lower 
plane, along with Pelleas and Ettarre. 

The time of the year in the preceding Idyll is full 
summer, and this represents, in Tennyson's way, the full 
flowering of the brutal society which he describes. But 
the season in which the last tournament is held is that of 
departing autumn — grey skies, wet winds, and all the 
woods yellowing to their fall. This also is Nature's 
reflection of the catastrophe in the Idyll. Arthur knows, 
when the tale is done, the guilt of Guinevere ; and 
Lancelot and all his kin are finally divided from the 
King. Meantime we are first shown the further degrada- 
tion of the society drawn in Pelleas and Ettarre. The 
story of this social picture is well introduced. The tale 
is told of Lancelot and Arthur riding through a moun- 
tain-pass and hearing a child wail : 

A stump of oak half-dead, 
From roots like some black coil of carven snakes, 
Clutcli'd at the crag, and started thro' mid-air 
Bearing an eagle's nest : and thro' the tree 
Rush'd ever a rainy wind, and thro' the wind 
Pierced ever a child's cry. 

And Lancelot climbed for the child, and round its throat 
lay a ruby carcanet which, when the child died, the 
Queen bade be tourneyed for. The purest knight, she 
said, should win for the purest maiden the jewels of this 
dead innocence. Hence the tournament is called The 
Tournament of the Dead Imiocence by a court to which 
innocence is unknown. The prize is won by Tristram, 



Idylls of the King 343 

the free-lover, and given to Isolt who abhors her hus- 
band. In this fierce contrast Tennyson strikes out on 
his canvas the mocking cynicism in which he involves 
the court. There is no innocence which is not dead, 
and there is no love which is innocent. 

Secondly, before the jousts are held, we see how the 
government of the kingdom has broken down. A knight, 
once of the Table Round, has set up a new Round 
Table in the north, framed directly counter to Arthur's 
Table. He slays, burns, robs, and maims the poor, 
hangs the knights of Arthur, and bids the King beware, 
for— 

his hour is come ; 
The heathen are upon him, his long lance 
Broken, and his Excalibur a straw. 

Arthur rides away to chastise this felon, and when he 
returns all is ruin. But before he goes — and this is 
finely conceived by Tennyson — he touches those two 
who have destroyed his work, and leaves an impression 
of himself upon them ; on Lancelot, that which kindles 
remorse in him, on Guinevere, that which awakens awe 
in her. She feels his apartness, his greatness, and his 
spirituality. 

In her high bower the Queen, 
Working a tapestry, lifted up her head, 
Watch'd her lord pass, and knew not that she sigh'd. 
Then ran across her memory the strange rhyme 
Of bygone Merlin, " Where is he who knows? 
From the great deep to the great deep he goes." 



344 Tennyson 



It is the theme, the introduction theme, of the Idylls 
that follow — Guinevere^ The Passing of Arthur — and its 
dim melody, brought in here, is the thought of a true 
artist. 

Then comes the tournament. A day of brooding 
storm, low thunder, sunless skies, and then of heavy 
rain, images, in Tennyson's fashion, the exhaustion, the 
dull coarseness and draggle of the last days of luxury 
and adultery. Lancelot, all weary, like a late guest over 
a fading fire, sat umpire of the lists, half careless, half 
angry with the lawlessness and cowardice of the tourney. 
All its rules were broken ; and when Tristram entered 
the lists no one was brave enough to oppose him. The 
tournament ends in mockery and cursing, and Lancelot 
cries, 

" The glory of our Round Table is no more." 

When Tristram comes for the prize, Lancelot asks, 
" Art thou the purest, brother ? " and Tristram scoffs, 
** Be happy in your fair Queen, as I in mine." There is 
no trace of shame left ; the nakedness of life is openly 
displayed. When Tristram rides round the lists with 
his prize he is discourteous to all the women. " This 
day," he cries, " my Queen of Beauty is not here." So, 
even the glory of courtesy, that last infirmity of chiv- 
alry, is gone. Then falls thick rain, and in the wet and 
weariness the women mock : 

Praise the patient saints, 
Our one white day of Innocence hath past, 
Tho' somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it. 



Idylls of the King 345 

At the revels which follow, the mirth is so loud that the 
Queen retires indignant, and in her bosom pain is lord. 
And the first part ends with a talk between Tristram and 
Dagonet the fool, which insists in other fashion on the 
ruin a general sensuality has wrought. 

The second part takes up the ancient story of Tris- 
tram and Isolt, and the story is used and modified by 
Tennyson to represent another phase of illicit love and 
its result on character. The love of Tristram and Isolt 
in his hands is of a very different type from that of 
Lancelot and Guinevere. Lancelot and the Queen 
have loved from the beginning, and through the golden 
times of the Round Table. The nobleness of the time, 
and the nobleness it made in them, pervaded their love, 
and lifted it above itself. It is always faithful, always 
courteous, always silent, always intense, and often re- 
pentant. But Tennyson makes Tristram and Isolt love 
without any nobleness. Their passion has nothing spirit- 
ual in it, nothing that lifts it into the imaginative realm. 
The light that leads astray is the fire of sense alone. 
Tristram is unfaithful, and has become uncourteous. 
He talks of the freedom of Love to love wherever it may 
please, and of their love failing when beauty fails, and 
when desire is cold. He speaks in this light, tossing 
way in the presence of the woman whom he has loved ; 
and Isolt, though she shows indignation, suffers it at last 
with indifference. In the midst of this Mark comes by, 
and cleaves Tristram through the brain. 

This sketch, not of our Tristram, but of an invented 



346 Tennyson 



Tristram, of his lightness of character, and his random 
heart, of his wandering thought, of his soul led by the 
senses, and his conscience hushed by pleasure — and of 
the result of these characteristics made into a theory of 
life and love — is admirably done. What he is, is em- 
bodied in his song. 

Free love — free field — we love but while we may : 
The woods are hush'd, their music is no more : 
The leaf is dead, the yearning past away : 
New leaf, new life — the days of frost are o'er : 
New life, new love, to suit the newer day : 
New loves are sweet as those that went before : 
Free love — free field — we love but while we may. 

The introduction of this Tristram story no doubt en- 
hances, in another form, the whole of the ethical lesson 
to nations and to individuals which is contained in the 
first part, but I feel from the point of view of art that 
there are strong objections to the whole of it. 

First, the old story of Tristram and Isolt is entirely 
changed and degraded. Tristram is not the Tristram we 
know, nor Isolt our Isolt ; they are both vulgarised. All 
the romance is taken out of them ; their great and inevi- 
table love is turned into a common intrigue. Their mighty 
sorrow, which has drawn the heart of the world to it, which 
so many poems have made into a purification of the soul, 
and to which Wagner gave all his strength, is left un- 
touched by Tennyson. Nay, their characters, as he draws 
them, are incapable of such a sorrow. No one has a right 
to alter out of recognition two characters in one of the 
great poetic stories of the world, and to blacken them. 



Idylls of the King 347 

Tennyson ought to have had more reverence for a great 
tale, and more intuition. What he does is all the worse 
because portions of the ancient story are kept and dwelt 
on, so that we are forced to think back over the whole 
tale we know, and to see through this travesty the noble 
things which have been travestied. To make a great 
tale in this fashion the stalking-horse of morality, to use 
it for a passing shot at adultery, to degrade characters 
which are not degraded, is an iniquity in art. If 
Tennyson wanted to do this kind of thing for the sake 
of a moral end, he ought to have left the beautiful 
romance alone, and to have invented a quite new story 
for his purpose. 

Moreover, this piece about Tristram and Isolt was 
quite unnecessary. The story told of them may, as I 
said, enhance by a fresh example the ethical aim of the 
first part ; but it is weaker than the first part, and the 
lesson is as strong without it. The additional weight 
given by it is not worth the artistic mistake the poet 
makes in introducing it. The reader, made angry by 
the degradation of Tristram and Isolt, becomes angry 
also with the moralities of the beginning of the Idyll. 
The first part says all that was necessary to say, and says 
it well. 

Thirdly, to shove in at the end, and into a corner, an 
immense story of human passion, covering as many years 
and as many events as the story of Lancelot himself, was 
a complete mistake. Tristram introduced as the victor 
in the jousts is well enough, and we may even endure his 



348 Tennyson 



soulless talk, though it falsifies his ancient character ; but 
to attempt to force a story, which is like a great sea, into 
this narrow pool, is beyond endurance, especially when 
the first event (that of the love-drink) which, by making 
the love of these two inevitable, raises the tale into fate- 
fulness, is deliberately left out. It would have, by excus- 
ing them, spoilt the ethical use which Tennyson makes 
of their story. This is too bad of him. 

Moreover, Tristram and Isolt take us away from the 
main contention. At the very moment when the whole 
conception of Tennyson should have been concentrated 
into white light, in which everything else should be lost, 
around Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, we are 
carried away to Tintagil, and forced to remember at 
that distant place the whole of the Tristram story. It 
would have been far better to have omitted it altogether, 
and to have told, for the second part of this Idyll, the 
history of the last meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, of 
the treachery of Modred, and of the flight of Guinevere, 
which at present is told in the Idyll of Guinevere. These 
belong to this Idyll properly, for when Arthur returns 
from his expedition to the north, he finds Guinevere 
gone. Then too, the expedition to the north could be 
told in its proper place. Tennyson would not have been 
obliged to drag it in, like a belated recollection, in the 
middle of Tristram's ride through the forest. These, 
then, are the unfortunate things into which the ethical 
direction of a work of art, when it is primary and not 
secondary, forces an artist. 



Idylls of the King 349 

The description of Arthur's expedition is the one 
excellent thing in this Idyll. It has the keenest sight of 
the things described, and it sets Arthur forth, as he 
ought to be at this time, in heroic proportions. We see 
him, the unstained, the majestic King, midst of a stained 
and degraded world, faithful alone among the faithless. 
We see also the wild northern land near the sea, the 
black and lonely tower among the marshes ; and they 
are painted with undiminished vividness and strength. 

He dream'd ; but Arthur with a hundred spears 

Rode far, till o'er the illimitable reed, 

And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle, 

The wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh 

Glared on a huge machicolated tower 

That stood with open doors, whereout was roll'd 

A roar of riot. 

One of the knights of the Round Table has been hung 
near the gate on a dead tree, and beside him hangs a 
horn. And Arthur blew the horn — 

Then at the dry harsh roar of the great horn, 
That sent the face of all the marsh aloft 
An ever upward-rushing storm and cloud 
Of shriek and plume — 

a splendid description of the host of water-birds rising 
startled from the marsh — the felon knight comes forth, 
and before the mighty presence of the King, not a blow 
stricken, fell — 

as the crest of some slow-arching wave, 
Heard in dead night along that table-shore, 
Drops flat, and after the great waters break 



350 Tennyson 



Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, 
From less and less to nothing ; thus he fell. 

This, with the illimitable reed and the wide-winged 
sunset over glancing plash and shallowy isle, is a mag- 
nificent description of Nature. Every adjective in it is 
superbly chosen ; but not less magnificent is the last 
vision of the flaming tower reddening all the meres and 
the sea beyond : 

Which half that autumn night, like the live North. 

Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor, 

Made all above it, and a hundred meres 

About it, as the water Moab saw 

Come round by the east, and out beyond them flush'd 

The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea. 

Lancelot, of all the male characters in the Idylls of 
the King, is the least troubled by the allegory. He is so 
un-allegorical that when he is present with the other 
characters, at those times when they are allegorical, he 
confuses their symbolism, or materialises them into real 
personages. He often seems like a man among ghosts. 
His tale is modernised, but not so flagrantly modernised 
as that of the rest. We might sometimes mistake him 
for the Lancelot of Malory. 

But though not allegorical, he is ethical, and, in this 
sphere, he is entirely modernised. The moral teaching 
embodied in him and his relation to Guinevere and Ar- 
thur, gathers round the question of faithfulness and 
unfaithfulness in love and marriage. Of the three, 
Lancelot is again the most actual, if I may use that 



Idylls of the King 351 

word in this manner. But he is actual as a gentleman 
of our own time, not as the romance knights of the 
thirteenth century, or of the book of Malory. They 
had a totally different code of honour in their love- 
matters from that which rules our social conscience. 

It is quite allowable in art to re-create the characters 
of an old tale, provided this re-creation ennobles the 
men and women as much as the original treatment, or 
awakens as much sympathy for them. The old story 
gathers our affections in one fashion round Arthur, 
Guinevere, and Lancelot. Tennyson does it in another 
way altogether — in the ethical, not in the romantic way. 
He was justified in this if his form was good. But he 
keeps so much of the romantic story that he forces us to 
mix up his Lancelot with the ancient Lancelot, and the 
two clash in our minds. Again and again their unfitted- 
ness each to each, the irreconcilability of their atmos- 
pheres, disturbs the reader of the Idylls. It is difficult 
to keep them apart, yet to read the poem with justice to 
Tennyson we must do this difficult thing. We must 
ignore the Lancelot of the Romances, when at the same 
time we are continually reminded of him. 

Outside of this criticism which has only to do with 
the form of the tale, Tennyson's conception and drawing 
of Lancelot are full of power. He is Arthur's earliest 
and dearest friend. He and Arthur swear undying 
fealty to one another on the field of battle. On Lan- 
celot's steadiness in this, since he is the greatest of the 
knights and has the largest clan, depends half the 



352 Tennyson 



strength and enduringness of the Round Table. He has 
himself an unbroken admiration for the King, and pays 
him undiminished honour and affection from the begin- 
ning to the end. He never wavers in this faithfulness, 
which is the root of his character. So he is represented 
in the old story, and so Tennyson represents him. 

But at one point, not in romantic eyes but in ours, he 
is unfaithful to Arthur. He loves Guinevere and takes 
away her love from the King. There is a certain inevi- 
tableness in this love, for which Tennyson allows, while 
he condemns the love. And there is an absolute faith- 
fulness in it on both sides which keeps the characters 
noble, while the thing itself is represented as not noble. 
Lancelot, the lover, is as constant to Guinevere, as 
Lancelot, the friend, is to the King. But it is in this 
double faithfulness that the pain and the punishment of 
life inhere — faithful to Arthur, but unfaithful at the 
dearest point ; faithful to Guinevere, but making her 
unfaithful at that central point of life in which the fate 
of her husband, of his work, and of his kingdom is 
contained. 

This is a tragic position. It cannot be called tragic 
in the Romances, for in the chivalric circles of the ro- 
mantic centuries Lancelot's love of the Queen did not 
altogether clash, in men's minds, with his fidelity to 
Arthur. But Tennyson, making the first element in the 
situation Lancelot's profound constancy (he cannot love 
the King less, he cannot love the Queen less), wraps 
Lancelot up in the moral atmosphere which, in our 



Idylls of the King 353 

century as in others, surrounds the marriage tie, and 
the situation is at once ethically tragic. Lancelot's 
fidelity to the King jars with his fidelity to Guinevere, 
and his life is rent to pieces between the two. Both are 
the deepest things in him, and both are at war in his 
heart ; and the best piece of character-work in the Idylls 
is the slow delineation of this intimate and tormented 
strife. He is true to the King and true to the Queen, 
but his truth to the King makes him shrink from the 
Queen, and his truth to the Queen makes him shrink 
from the King. Tennyson puts this terrible position — 
terrible to the character he represents Lancelot to be — 
in the two well-known lines — 

His honour rooted in dishonour stood, 
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. 

The battle in his soul comes to a crisis in the Idyll of 

Lancelot and Elaine. Arthur asks Lancelot if he will 

come to the jousts for the Diamond. " No," he replies, 

for he thinks the Queen wishes him to stay with her. 

" To blame, my Lord Lancelot," the Queen says, when 

Arthur is gone. " You must go ; our knights and the 

crowd will murmur if you stay." "Are you so wise, my 

Queen ? " answers Lancelot, vext that he must seem to 

have lied to the King, " once it was not so." But he 

obeys, and on his way to the jousts he meets Elaine, 

who loves him, and who, being unloved by him, dies of 

her love. The Queen is jealous, and her suspicion 

makes Lancelot realise the restlessness and misery of a 
23 



354 Tennyson 



life which absohite trust between him and Guinevere 
can alone make endurable. Moreover, he is wronged 
by her jealousy, and to be thus wronged in love by one 
we love, while it deepens love, makes it seem for the 
time contemptible. He is thought to be untrue when he 
is conscious he is most true. And he disdains love, life, 
and all things. 

Then the King is sorry that his knight iS unable to 
love — why could he not love this maiden ? And the 
unsuspiciousness of the King makes Lancelot conscious 
of friendship failed and of honour lost. He is thought 
to be true when he knows he is most untrue. This is a 
double torture, and it is finely wrought out by Tenny- 
son. It comes to a point of self-knowledge and self- 
abasement in his soliloquy, when, leaving the Queen 
wrathful, and Arthur sorrowing and surprised, and the 
girl who loved and died for him in her grave, he sits 
thinking by the river, and wishes that his life had never 
been. The lines in which he analyses his inmost soul 
are equally plain and subtle, full of that curious truth 
with which a man, embittered for the moment, views 
himself ; and as concentrated as if they had been done 
by Milton's intellectual force. Indeed, some of them 
are entirely in Milton's manner : 

For what am I ? What profits it my name 
Of greatest knight ? I fought for it and have it ; 
Pleasure to have it, none ; to lose it, pain ; 
Now grown a part of me : but what use in it ? 
To make men worse by making my sin known ? 
Or sin seem less, the sinner seeming great ? 



Idylls of the King 355 

Alas for Arthur's greatest knight, a man 
Not after Arthur's heart ! I needs must break 
These bonds that so defame me : not without 
She wills it : would I, if she will'd it ? nay, 
Who knows ? but if I would not, then may God, 
I pray him, send a sudden Angel down 
To seize me by the hair and bear me far, 
And fling me deep in that forgotten mere, 
Among the tumbled fragments of the hills ! 

It is the commonest cry of weakness in the unhappy- 
hours of passion to ask the gods to work a miracle. But 
what the will does not will to do the gods leave alone. 

And now, remorse, envenomed by love's vexation, 
grew in the man ; and when the quest of the Holy Grail 
arose, Lancelot, thinking he might get rid of his sin, 
thinking the miracle had come — his love less dear to 
him for the moment, because the Queen had been un- 
just to him — said to himself : " If I can but see this 
Holy Thing, my sin may be plucked out of my heart." 
But while he strove, his love awoke again, for not from 
without but from within is passion quelled ; and the 
strife so deepened that madness came upon him. 

And whipt him into waste fields far away. 

Afterwards, when he half saw the Holy Grail, it knew 
that his wrong love was dearer than his desire to be 
right, and it smote him down. Yet nobleness lived in 
him, and might have come to flower had he but willed 
to surrender his love. But how could he surrender it 
when the surrender meant misery to Guinevere ? Was 
he not bound to be faithful to her, even if he perished 



356 Tennyson 



for it eternally ? And in that thought, which was of 
course half made up by his own desire, the personal 
wrong to Arthur, the still greater wrong to the kingdom 
and to society which his love was slowly accomplishing, 
became like vapours in the sun. He ceased to desire 
freedom from his guilt. And as in all the heat of 
his feeble remorse and of his search for the Grail, 
he had never willed, but only wished for righteousness, 
the failure of the spiritual excitement left him weaker 
than before, but less repentant. In Pelleas and Etta7-re^ 
the Idyll which succeeds the Holy Grail, he has wholly 
lost his remorse. He is at peace, and has given himself 
wholly to his love. These are the lines from Pelleas 
and Ettarre^ in which we see the quiet content of 
accepted guilt : 

Not long thereafter from the city gates 

Issued Sir Lancelot riding airily, 

Warm with a gracious parting from the Queen, 

Peace at his heart, and gazing at a star 

And marvelling what it was. 

But this peaceful pleasure in wrong, when all effort to 
overcome it is over, does not endure. Love in unright- 
eousness loses animation at last, and the pleasure of it 
passes into languor. In the Idyll of The Last Tourna- 
ment Lancelot presides in Arthur's seat instead of the 
King, and all the world seems to him lifeless. He has 
lost all care, even for the laws of chivalry : 

Sighing weariedly, as one 
Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, 
When all the goodlier guests are past away, 



Idylls of the King 357 

Sat their great umpire, looking o'er the lists. 
He saw the laws that ruled the tournament 
Broken, but spake not. 

Nevertheless, long love, in spite of languor, holds him 
by a thousand ties to the Queen, till she herself, fearful 
of discovery, bids him go. But to the very close he is 
loveloyal, courteous, obedient to the woman whom he 
loved ; and when he leaves her he repents and dies. 
His faithfulness even in false love is reckoned to him 
for righteousness, or rather, when he ceases to violate his 
conscience, becomes a root of righteousness in him. 
This is Tennyson's ethical picture of this tragic situa- 
tion, and it is done with great poetic insight into the 
human heart. Moreover (though it is charged through- 
out with a moral lesson) the artistic representation is, 
on the whole, the foremost thing. 

I may say the same, though not so strongly, of the 
representation of Guinevere. It is said that Tennyson 
intended her, in his allegory, to image forth the Heart 
(or what we mean by that term) in human nature. She 
certainly does not represent the infinite variety of the 
human affections. However, by falling short of the 
allegorical aim of the poet, she gains as a real person. 
She is a living woman, not an abstraction. But at the 
same time she is not an interesting woman. She repre- 
sents a somewhat common type. Her intelligence is of 
the slightest, and her character has little variety. We 
infer that she had charm, but it does not appear in the 
Idylls of the King^ save once when she talks with Gareth 



,58 Tennyson 



on the hillside. She is stately and lovely, courteous, 
eager to please, capable of a great passion, and, in this 
Idyll, of a great repentance ; but this is nothing ex- 
traordinary. Such a woman may be found anywhere. 
There is nothing especially creative in Tennyson's con- 
ception. She is a Queen, but not a queen in poetry. 

Young, she threw herself recklessly into her love. 
In after years she loved on, but with a prudence for 
which Lancelot half reproaches her. She admires her 
husband, but the reasons for which she admires him are, 
she thinks, reasons why she should not love him ; and 
she is cool and still enough — in an hour when passion is 
in abeyance — to contrast him in Lancelot's presence 
with Lancelot ; and to analyse why she came to love 
Lancelot more than Arthur, as if it were an intellectual 
inquiry. This, too, is essentially usual, and her passion 
has little to separate her from the rest of her sex into 
an individual interest, such as Browning could not have 
failed to give to her. The central passage of her delin- 
eation is in Lancelot and Elaine. Tennyson marks it as 
important, for he quotes a thought from it in the last 
speech of Guinevere after her parting from the King — 
that phrase about light and colour. Lancelot asks if 
Arthur has said aught. 

She broke into a little scornful laugh : 
" Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King, 
That passionate perfection, my good lord — 
But who can gaze upon the sun in heaven ? 
He never spake word of reproach to me, 
He never had a glimpse of mine untruth, 



Idylls of the King 359 

He cares not for me : only here to-day 

There gleam'd a vague suspicion in his eyes : 

Some meddling rogue has tamper'd with him — else 

Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round, 

And swearing men to vows impossible, 

To make them like himself : but, friend, to me 

He is all fault who hath no fault at all : 

For who loves me must have a touch of earth ; 

The low sun makes the colour : I am yours, 

Not Arthur's, as ye know, save by the bond." 

She stands forth then — settled down in the wrong, 
and thinking herself right. In the same Idyll jealousy 
comes upon her. In her jealousy she is still the ordi- 
nary woman. It is true that a woman does not show, 
while she is jealous, variety of character. Jealousy eats 
up all other feelings and interests. But if she be a 
woman of intellect, power, or variety, what she says in 
her jealousy — since it is said in the very hell of passion 
— will at least display shreds of these qualities. Guine- 
vere is without them. That which Tennyson makes 
her say in the passage beginning 

It may be I am quicker of belief 

Than you believe me, Lancelot of the Lake, 

has not sufficient strength for the situation. It may be 
that Tennyson desired to run the character on very 
simple lines, but, if so, the simplicity should have been 
either forcible or pathetic. It is neither : it is some- 
what commonplace. It may be, he thought that to keep 
her the great lady he was bound to subdue her to this 
moderated tone, under which she is supposed to veil 



360 Tennyson 



her wrath. But the passion does not appear under the 
phrases — the tongues of flame do not lick upwards 
through the crust. It is worth while to read the scene 
between Cleopatra and the messenger who tells her that 
Anthony is married to Octavia, and contrast it with this 
passage of Tennyson's. Cleopatra is furious with jeal- 
ousy ; she is the passion itself, but in the very heat of it, 
what imagination, what power, what intellect dazzle from 
her like lightnings ! The myriad variety of the woman 
emerges through the dominant passion. 

After this jealousy — being convinced that it was base- 
less — she, like Lancelot, settles down into the pleasant 
peacefulness of accepted wrong ; but as this peaceful- 
ness does not last with Lancelot, so it does not last with 
Guinevere, and Tennyson tells, and excellently, of the 
waking of her conscience. When the moral conduct of 
life, when the great sanctions of morality are to be rep- 
resented, Tennyson impassionates them and lifts them 
into poetry. This is one of his greatest powers. He 
cannot draw the passions themselves or their working 
with the excellence of the great masters, but he does 
draw with a level power the moral exaltation which fol- 
lows on noble passions nobly felt, or the moral depres- 
sion which follows when they begin to feel themselves 
ignoble. Henceforth 

the Powers that tend the soul, 
To help it from the death that cannot die, 
And save it even in extremes, began 
To vex and plague her. 



Idylls of the King 361 

Grim faces and vague spiritual fears beset her as she 
lies awake at night beside the sleeping King. Or, if she 
sleep, she dreams 

An awful dream ; for then she seem'd to stand 
On some vast plain before a setting sun, 
And from the sun there swiftly made at her 
A ghastly something, and its shadow flew 
Before it, till it touch'd her, and she turn'd — 
When lo ! her own, that broadening from her feet, 
And blackening, swallow'd all the land, and in it 
Far cities burnt, and with a cry she woke. 

And all this trouble grew, till she could bear no more, 
and bade Lancelot go. On the eve of their parting all 
is known. The shame outbreaks, and fills the Court and 
land. Weeping, they ride away and sever, he to his 
castle, she to the convent of Almesbury, and all night 
long as she rode the spirits of the waste and weald 
moaned round her, and the raven, flying high 

Croak'd, and she thought, " He spies a field of death" — 

for what her dream presaged was nigh at hand. 

All this is told in the beginning of the Idyll of Guin- 
evere, the story of which properly opens at her coming 
to Almesbury, where she lives, no one knowing who she 
is, and is waited on by a young and innocent novice. 
She is alone with her past love and with her sin, and 
sometimes the soft memory of the one is with her, and 
sometimes the grim presence of the other. Her repent- 
ance is not full as yet. She still regrets. The little 
novice talks of the wicked Queen, and urges that the 



362 Tennyson 



King's grief is the greatest in all the land. " May I not 
grieve," Guinevere says, " with the grief of the whole 
realm ? " " Yes," replies the little maid, " all women 
must grieve that it was a woman who wrought this 
confusion in the Table Round." " O maiden," answers 
the Queen, " what dost thou know of the great world ? " 
And when the maid speaks further of Lancelot himself 
and his disloyalty, she can bear it no more. Lancelot is 
first with her still, and she breaks forth in sudden flush 
of wrathful heat, thinking that the child has been set on 
to do this by the Abbess. " Spy and traitress," she cries, 
*' get thee hence ! " 

Then she is sorry for her anger. " 'T is my own guilt," 
she says, " that betrays itself ; " whereat (in a subtle pas- 
sage of self-deceiving) she argues whether she repents, 
and does the very thing the not doing of which she 
thinks is a proof of repentance — thinks again of Lancelot : 

" But help me, heaven, for surely I repent, 
For what is true repentance but in thought — 
Not ev'n in inmost thought to think again 
The sins that made the past so pleasant to us : 
And I have sworn never to see him more, 
To see him more ! " 

And ev'n in saying this, 
Her memory from old habit of the mind 
Went slipping back upon the golden days 
In which she saw him first. 

She paints that happy time in a beautiful recalling, her 
long ride with Lancelot to meet the King, then the meet- 
ing with Arthur, and how she 



Idylls of the King 363 

sigh'd to find 
Her journey done, glanced at him, thought him cold, 
High, self-contain'd, and passionless, not like him, 
" Not like my Lancelot ! " 

This is not repentance. It is the cherishing of ancient 
joy. " She grew half-guilty in her thoughts again." At 
this very moment of crisis in the inward life the King 
rides to the convent door. 

It is well conceived by Tennyson ; and Guinevere, 
hearing the King's step, falls prostrate on the floor, and 
a voice speaks to her : 

Monotonous and hollow like a ghost's 

Denouncing judgment, but, tho' changed, the King's. 

We know that speech of Arthur's, spoken by one who 
was going to his death, and having to the woman's ears 
the weight and truth of dying words. It tells her of her 
sin and the destruction she has wrought, and sternly : 

" The children born of thee are sword and fire, 
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws. 
The craft of kindred, and the godless hosts 
Of heathen swarming o'er the Northern Sea." 

But it also tells her that he loves her still, that he will 
urge her crimes no more, that he forgives as Eternal 
God forgives. He will not touch her here on earth, but 
in the world where all are pure she will understand at 
last, and claim him, not Lancelot, as her true love. 
Farewell, he says, and he bends to bless her. 

And this breaks down the woman's long love for 
another, and at last she loves Arthur ! When she loves 



364 Tennyson 



him she repents, but not till then. Guinevere is the 
ordinary woman. A strong-hearted woman, in whom 
either conscience or intellect was powerful, would have 
repented without loving Arthur, or not repented at all ; 
but this type of woman does not really repent of a sin 
of this kind till she loses love for one, and finds herself 
loving another. Guinevere at last loves Arthur, and then 
she has a horror of herself — but, since she loves afresh, 
she is upborne on this new delight, and, forgetting the 
past, looks forward to be Arthur's mate in heaven. That 
also is characteristic of this ordinary type. Her love 
saves her, and she passes into good deeds and ministrant 
power, and in the end, being Abbess as she has been 
Queen, she died and went — 

To where beyond these voices there is peace. 

Passing from Guinevere to the poem itself, it is neces- 
sary to repeat that it is entirely modern in form, feeling, 
and thought. There is not a trace in the Romances of 
its moralities, of its view of the relations between Arthur 
and Guinevere and Lancelot, of Arthur's feeling in the 
matter ; of its strict sense of sin and of repentance, 
of its careful insistance on the results of Guinevere's 
wrong on her inner life, of a single one of the 
motives used by Arthur in his last address to Guinevere.* 

* It is true that, in Malory's book, Arthur in his fury condemns 
Guinevere to the stake, and would " shamefully slay " Sir Lancelot ; 
but it is more because their crime was treason than immorality. 
Arthur is miserable, not because Guinevere has been false, but be- 



Idylls of the King 365 

If we wish then to live in this poem, to feel and 
understand Tennyson's work, we must put ourselves 
out of the romantic society and into the social and 
ethical position that he occupies. To find the power 
and beauty of any poem, we must breathe for the time 
the air the poet breathes. 

Some, however, attack this poem because of this eth- 
ical direction ; and there are places, certainly, where the 
ethical aim is made too prominent. But, after all, the 

cause he has lost Sir Lancelot, the support of his Round Table. He 
regrets that he was told of the matter. He goes to war with Lance- 
lot, not so much to wreak his private wrong as to satisfy Sir Gawain 
whose brothers Lancelot has slain. "Alas," he cries, "that ever 
this war was begun." He bursts into tears of sorrow, thinking on 
Lancelot's great courtesy, when Lancelot horses him in a battle. He 
falls sick with sorrow. " My lord King Arthur," says one of his 
knights, "would love Sir Lancelot, but Sir Gawain will not suffer 
him," There is nothing in the original story of Arthur's moral in- 
dignation in the Idylls. That passage in Tennyson where Arthur says 
that he holds the man the worst of public foes who lets the wife he 
knows to be false abide with him and rule his house, is utterly at 
variance with the sentiment of the original. Arthur is there anxious 
to have Guinevere back, and does receive her back with honour. 
Moreover society and the Church in the story differ altogether from 
Tennyson on this point. When the Pope hears of the war — "he con- 
sidering the great goodness of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, the 
most noble Knight of the world, called to him a noble clerk that at 
that time was there present, which was the Bishop of Rochester. And 
the Pope gave him bulls, under seal, charging him, upon pain of 
interdicting all England, that he take his Queen, dame Guinevere, 
to him again, and accord with Sir Lancelot " — which Arthur gladly 
does, receiving Guinevere from the hands of Lancelot ; but is driven 
by Gawain to banish Lancelot, to his great sorrow. So the Head of 
the Church and an English bishop — and all society agrees with them 
— intervene to do that very thing which Tennyson's Arthur declares 
is deadly to public morality. 



366 Tennyson 



artistic direction is here the dominant direction, and 
the ethical issues, though clear, are subordinate. It is not 
just to say that they override this Idyll ; and it seems to me 
that the real things these objectors dislike is his view of 
the relation between man and wife. To criticise the poem 
from the ground of that dislike has no weight as art-criti- 
cism. Moreover, Tennyson really felt passionately on 
this matter, and this strong emotion of his lifts the poem 
out of ethics into art. We feel all the strength and 
intensity of his nature in it ; personal feeling burns in it. 
There are places where the poem fails to keep its full power, 
not from any original want of deep feeling, but from 
spinning out the emotion into too fine a thread. But on 
the whole the poem preserves a steady level of moral 
passion which is almost unique in English poetry. Never- 
theless, the ethical aim, by its very nature, and in spite 
of the poet, tries to get the upper hand, and when it suc- 
ceeds in this, the poem instantly becomes troubled, and 
its power and beauty lose weight and fineness. It intrudes, 
for instance, into the most important passage of Guine- 
vere^ and injures the intensity and the effect of the last 
speech of the King. Tennyson makes Arthur, at a time 
when personal feeling should be supreme, turn aside to 
give a lecture on the subject of national purity, and of 
Guinevere's destruction of his work as a King. The 
King should have been dropped altogether and the man 
alone have spoken. I wish, if it be not impertinent to 
do so, that the whole of that passage beginning so like 
a sermon. 



Idylls of the King 367 

Bear with me for the last time while I show, 

and ending with 

The mockery of my people and their bane, 

were, with the exception of a few lines, left out ; and I 
wish also that the other passage, beginning 

O golden hair, with which I used to play 
Not knowing, 

and ending 

So far, that my doom is, I love thee still, 

were also expunged. It is too literal ; it maybe thought, 
but not expressed. I do not believe that the imagi- 
nation would have permitted it, if it had not been half- 
blinded by the sermon that precedes it. Both passages 
are outside the situation ; the first is too much in the 
cold, the second too much in the flesh. 

As to literary criticism, this Idyll is one of the best in 
the book. I think its form, as I have already said, would 
have been better if all the beginning of it, which ex- 
plains the reason of Guinevere's flight to Almesbury, had 
made part of the previous Idyll. We should then be 
wholly at Almesbury with the Queen, and there would be 
a clearer unity of place for the repose of the imagination. 
But, putting that aside, this Idyll makes a full unity of 
impression. We are v/holly involved in the fate of Guine- 
vere from the beginning to the end. Moreover we are 
carried back by two episodes v/hich concern her, one of 



368 Tennyson 



which is told to her by the maiden, to her earlier 
and happier days. These do not confuse the impres- 
sion of her sorrowful fate and presence. They heighten 
it by contrast. They bring her whole life into the 
narrow convent room and lay it at the feet of her pain, 
and our pity for the woman, and the moral impression 
of her story, are both deepened. 

These episodes are wrought out with great beauty ; 
clearly invented, full of colour, life, and movement, 
imagined in the air of old Romance, and relieving the 
pity and sorrow of the piece with the charm of youthful 
love, and with the gaiety of the elfin world. We see 
through Guinevere's soft, regretful memory her ride with 
Lancelot from her father's castle in the sinless Maytime, 

under groves that look'd a paradise 
Of blossom, over sheets of hyacinth 
That seem'd the heavens upbreaking thro' the earth — 

and we think of Tennyson's earlier poem when as yet 
nothing but the thoughtless delight of their youth and 
love engaged his mind. The next moment we are borne 
from this glad beginning to the tragic end, and the 
Queen hears the step of Arthur on the stair. The same 
sharp contrast is made by the story the little maid tells 
of the elfin rapture of the land and all its throng of life, 
on the news of Guinevere's marriage with Arthur. This 
is a lovely tale of fairy gaiety, as youthful, as much 
enchanted in imagination, as if its writer were only five- 
and-twenty. The novice tells what her father saw. 



I 



Idylls of the King 369 

He said 
That as he rode, an hour or maybe twain 
After the sunset, down the coast, he heard 
Strange music, and he paused, and turning — there 
All down the lonely coast of Lyonnesse, 
Each with a beacon-star upon his head, 
And with a wild sea-light about his feet, 
He saw them — headland after headland flame 
Far on into the rich heart of the west : 
And in the light the white mermaiden swam, 
And strong man-breasted things stood from the sea, 
And sent a deep sea-voice thro' all the land, 
To which the little elves of chasm and cleft 
Made answer, sounding like a distant horn. 

There is so much more, and of equal life and charm and 
strength ; and then, right over against this delightful 
flashing of fairyland in a conscience-less joy, is set the 
gloom and sorrow of the present, and the sympathy of 
Nature with it. The whole of Britain is covered with a 
pall of mist, the earth is cold and dark beneath it. 

The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face 
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still. 

Thus, while this happy story is told within, the vapour 

creeps on without, the symbol of the overwhelming of 

Arthur's work and life, and of the guilt of Guinevere. 

As Nature fitted herself to the rapture of the beginning, 

so she fits herself to the tragic end. 

Moreover this is done by the poet in preparation for 

the next Idyll, for the last dim battle in the west which 

is to be fought in the death-white vapour beside the 

moaning sea. Arthur is already folded in that mist ; 
24 



370 Tennyson 



his work is drowned in it ; and he fades away like a gray 
shadow, no man knowing whether he be dead or alive. 
Therefore in this Idyll we see the King through Guine- 
vere's eyes make his departure in the mist — a noble 
picture, exalting the image of the King as warrior and as 
lord, and vividly drawn, as if by Rembrandt, in the 
torches at the convent door. 

And ]£>, he sat on horseback at the door ! 

And near him the sad nuns with each a light 

Stood, and he gave them charge about the Queen, 

To guard and foster her for evermore. 

And while he spake to these his helm was lower'd. 

To which for crest the golden dragon clung 

Of Britain ; so she did not see the face. 

Which then was as an angel's, but she saw, 

Wet with the mists and stricken by the lighis, 

The Dragon of the great Pendragonship 

Blaze, making all the night a stream of fire. 

And even then he turn'd ; and more and more 
The moony vapour rolling round the King, 
Who seem'd the phantom of a giant in it, 
Enwound him fold by fold, and made him gray 
And grayer, till himself became as mist 
Before her, moving ghostlike to his doom. 

That doom is told in T/ie Passing of Arthur^ but that he 
is already enwound by its misty pall, and himself a ghost 
in it, is nobly conceived, and as splendidly expressed. 

The Passing of Arthur is set over against The Comi?ig 
of Arthur^ the epilogue over against the prologue. 
These two are not Idylls in Tennyson's idea. They are 
the framework in which the Idylls are contained, the 



Idylls of the King 371 

coming and going of the great King whose character and 
life make the existence of all the other characters in the 
book ; whose fate, from its beginning to its end, makes 
the unity and the diversity of the book. In every Idyll, 
save two, Arthur is the master of the action of the piece 
or the final judge of what has been done ; or if not 
master or judge, the dominant figure to accomplish 
whose destiny the doings in the Idyll have occurred. 
Even in Merlin a?id Vivien and in Pelleas and Ettarre^ he 
broods like a shadow over the events. We are forced to 
ask in the first what will happen to him and his work 
when he is deprived of his great councillor, the only one 
who knew his inmost soul ; and Tennyson, with great 
skill, drives us into asking that question. In Pelleas and 
Ettarre enough is said of him to force us to realise the 
dreadful fate which overhangs his work. We see him 
there, like Abdiel among the rebel host, the only one 
who still loves the great Virtues and the pursuit of per- 
fect duty in a world which loves vice as he loves virtue, 
and which worships the material as he worships the ideal 
life. He scarcely enters into the action of the piece, 
but he is, nevertheless, vividly present, standing in the 
background alone, wrapt in his fate as in a cloak. 

This dominance of one central figure towards whom 
converges all the action as well as all the personages of 
the poem, is that which gives it unity, and supplies it 
with whatever epic character it has. The Idylls of the 
King^ as a whole, borders on the epic ; it is not an 
epic. Its form forbids us to call it by that name, and I 



72 Tennyson 



suppose that Tennyson, feeling that, gave it the name of 
the Idylls of the King. Nevertheless, the idea of its be- 
coming an epic was originally in his mind, and influenced 
his later work upon the whole poem. He hovered, that 
is, between two forms of his art, and this apparent chang- 
ing, here and there as he wrote, of the class of poetry in 
v/hich the work was placed, vaguely troubles the reader. 
That unity of specialised impression which should at 
once tell a reader to what kind of poetry the poem 
belongs, is not here. 

Again, the proper end of an epic is the moral triumph 
of the hero over fate, over the attack of time, and over 
pain. He may be beaten into the dust, all but ruined by 
life ; but his soul is not subdued. He emerges clear, like 
Arcturus after a night of storm, purified, almost equal in 
calm to the immortal Gods. Conquered without, he is 
conqueror within. Even Fate retires, saying : " This 
man is greater than I." Even the Furies become the 
Eumenides. In the true epic this is always the position 
of the hero at the close. It is the position of Adam, it 
is that of Dante, of ^neas, of Achilles. It is not alto- 
gether, only partly, the position of Arthur. He passes 
away, it is true into the land beyond, tended by the 
Queens. There is a vague rumour that he will return, but 
no one knows. Ignorance, doubt, dimly lit at rare times 
by faith, enshroud his fate. His kingdom, he thinks, will 
reel back into the beast. This is not the true end, nor 
the feeling, of an epic hero. 

Arthur's work has failed. Love, friendship, his ideal 



Idylls of the King 2>72) 

— have also broken down. That fate might belong to 
the epic hero, but that which could not, in an epic, 
belong to him, is the breaking down of Arthur's soul. 
He has no clear faith in moral victory, or in the Gods 
being, beyond our follies and our pain, the masters of 
right and love. Such was the faith of (Edipus at Co- 
lonus, in that Trilogy which is so near an epic in feeling. 
Such is the faith of Achilles, of ^neas, of Adam, in the 
great epics. The epic heroes always issue forth from 
^e\\ a rtveder le stelle J and from their Purgatory, /z^r^ 
e disposto a salire allc stelle. 

This faith does not pervade or close the Idylls. The 
steady belief of In Memoriatn in the certainty of the 
end being good, and of the value, therefore, of all 
human effort, is gone from the Idylls of the King. I 
suppose that the sceptical trouble of the confused and 
wavering time during which the Idylls were written had 
now stolen into Tennyson. He did not become, judg- 
ing from this poem alone, altogether a pessimist. He 
was too much of a prophet to be altogether that lifeless 
personage. But he drifted frequently towards that 
position, and then drifted back again. And the Idylls of 
the King represent this wavering between hope and 
despondency, between faith and unfaith in either God 
or man. Their writer, if we judge from this poem 
alone, and from the fate he allots allegorically to Arthur, 
did not know at this time where he was, nor what he be- 
lieved, nor what he disbelieved, but, on the whole, flung 
himself at last on prayer. Even that conclusion belongs to 



374 Tennyson 



the earlier poem. The beginning of The Passing of 
Arthur places Arthur in a condition which is best ex- 
pressed by one line in In Memoriam : 

And vaguely trust the larger hope. 

I give the passage : 

I found Him in the shining of the stars, 
I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields, 
But in His ways with men I find Him not. 
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die. 
O me ! for why is all around us here 
As if some lesser god had made the world. 
But had not force to shape it as he would, 
Till the High God behold it from beyond, 
And enter it, and make it beautiful ? 
Or else as if the world were wholly fair. 
But that these eyes of men are dense and dim. 
And have not power to see it as it is : 
Perchance, because we see not to the close ; — 
For I, being simple, thought to work His will. 
And have but stricken with the sword in vain ; 
And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend 
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm 
Reels back into the beast and is no more. 
My God, Thou hast forgotten me in my death : 
Nay — God my Christ — I pass but shall not die. 

Doubt, and all its trouble ! Unable to affirm or deny 
anything ! No clear belief, no triumph of the soul ! 
And the last battle is fought in a death-white mist, not 
one ray of sunlight to illumine it ! Men know not 
friend from foe ; old ghosts look in on the fight ; every 
man who fought in it fought with his heart cold 

With formless fear ; and ev'n on Arthur fell 
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. 



Idylls of the King 375 

I remember the years in which these lines were written, 
and the temper of society, and they describe that temper 
with a great imagination. It was a time when every be- 
lief was challenged, when society had almost ceased to 
hope or believe in the future even of man on the earth, 
and when political and social ideas which prophesied 
the advent of a more unselfish world were laughed at as 
unpractical. Moreover those ideas were then only to be 
found in a vague form among the working classes, of 
whose life and hopes and struggle Tennyson knew noth- 
ing. Few then kept their faith, whether in God and 
Man, or in Man alone ; few were bold enough to believe 
that the confusion was not the prelude to decay but the 
turmoil that precedes a new birth, and Tennyson was 
not one of these. He was in one part of his nature, and 
judging from his poetry alone, too much the pfod:uct of 
the Universities, too much in the society which is called 
cultured, too apart from the surgings of the people, too 
much in harbour — to be able in the midst of the con- 
fusion to see the great order, in the midst of the battle 
to be sure of the victory. At other times, and in another 
part of his nature, whenever he yielded himself wholly to 
the pure Muse within him, and did not bring his impulse 
to the tribunal of the understanding for criticism, he 
escapes into that land of faith where the sun shines on 
the glory which shall be, and, doubting no more, proph- 
esies clear good ; but this, which is true of the time when 
he wrote In Memortam, and also of his old age when the 
epic of his life closed in a hero's victory, is not true of 



2,y6 Tennyson 



the period when he wrote the beginning of T/ie Passing 
of Arthur^ nor indeed, as I think, of the whole of the 
period of the composition of the Idylls of the Kifig. 
These were the days of his dim battle in the mist. And 
perhaps this trouble was all the worse for him, because 
the audacities, the reckless hopes, the faiths which be- 
lieve without seeing, the keen contempt for any society 
which says *' All is wrong or going wrong," or, '' I can- 
not tell whether all is wrong or right," were not his dowry 
as a poet. Even v/hen Arthur is carried away over the 
mere to Avalon, and when he cries back to Bedivere — in 
the part of the poem which was published in 1842 — that 
prayer has power with God, he says : 

For all my mind is clouded with a doubt. 

I do not press that line, however, into my statement, for 
it may be merely a suggestion of the vagueness of 
Arthur's fate, of which we are left ignorant in the 
Romances ; but it, Avith all the rest, fits in to prove the 
point with which I began and to which I now return, 
that Arthur is not an epic hero, and that this poem can- 
not be called an epic. Tennyson did not call it so, but 
others have. The epic hero must have a clear moral 
victory and be purified into clearness, and this is not the 
case with Arthur. 

I turn now to Arthur himself as conceived by Tenny- 
son. First, it must be understood that Tennyson's 
Arthur has even less to do with the Arthur of the Ro- 
mances than his Lancelot has with the romantic Lan- 



Idylls of the King ^^j^] 

celot. The moral or even the social atmosphere of the 
Arthur of chivalry is not the atmosphere which Ten- 
nyson's Arthur breathes. Again I recur to the primal 
fault of form, which belongs to the whole poem. The 
Arthur in Tennyson's mind, and the Arthur of the 
romantic era, are linked together by an unnatural tie, 
and the two often quarrel. Most of the objections 
made against Arthur have their real root in this. They 
are objections rather against the form than against the 
poem. But, on the whole, Arthur as the modern gentle- 
man, as the modern ruler of men, such a ruler as one of 
our Indian heroes on the frontier, is the main thing in 
Tennyson's mind, and his conception of such a man 
contains his ethical lesson to his countrymen. 

As to Arthur the King, he is a man who has the 
power of sending his own soul into the soul of his fol- 
lowers, and making them his own — images of himself — 
and this is the power of a born ruler of men. It is 
the one-man power, that power of which Carlyle as 
well as Tennyson made too much — because the secret 
of the progress of mankind, a secret the true ruler 
should understand, does not lie in one great individu- 
ality devouring all other individualities and making 
them into his pattern, but in his so sacrificing his nat- 
ural mastery as to develop into vividness the individual 
forces of all the characters he governs. Carlyle never 
saw that truth, nor Ruskin, nor Tennyson. But Tenny- 
son, though he often preached this one-man theory, does 
not hold it fast. It seems to have crept into his mind — 



78 Tennyson 



wavering hither and thither on many subjects during 
the years in Avhich he wrote the Idylls — that this theory 
did not hold water in practice. For, though Arthur 
imposes his character at first on all his knights, they all 
glide away from him. Their separate individualities 
assert themselves, and assert themselves in reaction 
from the foreign, overmastering, and exalted personality 
of Arthur. In fact, Tennyson represents in the Idylls, 
whether consciously or not, the complete breaking down 
in practice of the theory of the heaven-born ruler who 
makes every one into his own pattern. I do not think 
he meant to give us this good democratic lesson, but he 
has given it. 

Another part of the conception of Arthur as ruler, is 
that with which all the ethical writers, whether of his- 
tory or fiction, have, during the last fifty years, made us 
familiar ; and which many Englishmen, sent to our far 
dependencies, have illustrated by their lives. Arthur is 
the clearer of the waste places of the earth, the driver 
forth of the cruel beast and the lawless man, he who lets 
in the light and air, the doer of stern justice, the de- 
liverer of the oppressed, the organiser of law and order, 
the welder together of all the forces of the kingdom into 
a compact body for right and against wrong, the builder 
of great cities and noble architecture, the teacher of 
agriculture, the maker of roads and water-ways, the 
Culture Hero, as the Folklorists would call him ; and, 
finally, the great warrior who, though he does not excel 
the rest of his men in courage, excels them all as leader 



Idylls of the King 379 

of the battle. On all this there is nothing particular 
to say. It is the general, the well-known conception. 

The rest of the conception of Arthur as King is as 
the moral lawgiver, and chiefly as the demander of 
chasity. It is on the breaking of the law of purity that 
he most insists to Guinevere as the cause of the ruin of 
his aims and of his Order. His knights may love — nay, 
nothing so well makes a man as the maiden passion for 
a maid. His knights may marry : life finds its crown 
in a true marriage. But only one maiden is to be loved, 
and wedded man and woman must live only for each 
other. And we have seen that this is Tennyson's 
opinion. All his poetry is full of it. 

Yet, he makes the whole effort utterly break down, 
and I do not comprehend his position. I sometimes 
think that the hopelessness of the years in which he 
wrote the Idylls seized upon him, and he ceased for a 
time to believe in the victory of good. For it is not 
only the partial failure of purity of life which he repre- 
sents in the Idylls ; it is its complete overthrow. Every 
one, with the exception of Arthur, Percivale, his sister, 
and Sir Bors, becomes unchaste. I sometimes think 
that he wished to illustrate the truth that vows imposed 
from without were not only useless when the character 
remained unchanged, but that they drove men and 
women into their opposites ; and perhaps that his 
hatred of monkery influenced him further in this di- 
rection ; but the astonishing result to which he comes 
is more than these motives should produce, Not a. 



380 Tennyson 



soul keeps the vows, except Arthur and those who have 
left the world for the cloister. I do not understand why 
he works out a result which seems not only to contra- 
dict the possibility of his rule of chastity being observed, 
but which makes that rule issue in a wholly shameless 
society. It is as if he despaired of purity. The thing 
he most insists on is made by him to be the impossible 
thing. This is an excessively curious conclusion for 
Tennyson to come to. 

Every one in the Idylls, save the few I have mentioned, 
thinks this vow too much for mortal man. Merlin says 
that no one can keep it. Vivien and Mark, of course, 
laugh it to scorn. Guinevere declares it to be impossi- 
ble, and Lancelot knows it. Gawain openly adopts 
unchastity. Pelleas says that the King has made his 
knights fools and liars ; Tristram, that he himself had 
sworn but by the shell, that the strict vow snaps itself, 
that flesh and blood were sure to violate it. 

Bind me to one ? The wide world laughs at it. 

Why does Tennyson, we wonder, make almost all his 
characters think chastity impossible ? 

Then, he even goes further. The condition of society 
in the court and country set forth in Pelleas afid Ettarre 
and in The Last Toicrnament is incredibly bad. Every 
woman is unchaste and every man. Ettarre is as im- 
moral as Tristram, and both far more so than they are 
in the original tales. Rome in its decadence, France 
under the Regent, were not so wholly evil as Arthur's 



Idylls of the King 381 

court, with the sole exception of Arthur. The poet 
proves too much. Arthur's eifort is too ghastly a failure. 
And the representation of this result — unless we fall 
back on the needs of the allegory for an explanation — 
is not in the interests of morality. Tennyson does not 
really — in this working out of his moral aim — strengthen 
the will to be chaste, but weakens it. The chief thing 
that appears is that chastity is an impossibility. Tenny- 
son cannot, of course, have meant this ; but his art 
ought to have saved him from the possibility of its infer- 
ence. Had he been less ethical and less allegorical, he 
would not have fallen into this artistic error. 

There are better things to say when we think of 
Tennyson's conception of Arthur as a man — as the 
" very perfect knight." We have a part of the charac- 
ter he meant to represent in the dedication to the Idylls 
of the King, where he compares his Arthur to Prince 
Albert. 

And indeed he seems to me 
Scarce other than my King's ideal knight, 
" Who reverenced his conscience as his king ; 
Whose glory was, redressing human wrong ; 
Who spake no slander, no, nor listen'd to it ; 
Who loved one only and who clave to her — " 

But Arthur is more than that. He is not only faith- 
ful to his wife, he is as faithful in friendship as in love. 
Affection of any kind once given is always given. His 
chastity is as perfect as Galahad's, within the bounds of 
marriage. His honour is unstained, and no passion of 
whatever force has power to make him waver from its 



382 Tennyson 



call. His word, once passed, is passed for ever. He is 
so true that he cannot believe in untruthfulness, so faith- 
ful that he is unsuspicious of unfaithfulness. What is 
right and just to do he does, though all the world fall to 
ruin round him. His moral courage is as great as his 
physical courage. He can rise into a white heat of 
wrath or love ; but he is not led away by false or fleet- 
ing heats of feeling into folly or intemperance. Add 
to this absolute courtesy, gentleness, pity, forgiveness 
for the fallen, unselfish joy in the fame and glory of 
others, and we see the. perfect knight of Tennyson. It 
is confessedly an ideal, but an ideal to which the poet 
desired us to aspire, and to gain which he thought pos- 
sible. This ideal has been the object of many critical 
attacks, or, to put it more justly, Arthur has been depre- 
ciated as a man with various mockeries. I need not 
particularise them. They have been about us for a long 
time in reviews, in society, among men and women who 
call themselves emancipated, and the question is : " Is 
there any truth at the bottom of this irritation against 
the character of Arthur ? " 

If the irritation be directed against those parts of his 
character on which I have now dwelt, against this ideal 
of a knight, then it is not only a false irritation, but it 
also speaks ill for the society which is afflicted by it. 
Tennyson has drawn in Arthur that which every man 
ought to wish to be. The qualities of Arthur would, 
when vital in our lives, make our society noble and lov- 
ing, magnanimous and magnificent. The whole world 



Idylls of the King 383 

ought to be better for this picture of a man, and the 
future will be grateful to Tennyson for it. On this side 
of the matter these critics are not to be trusted. 

But is there no side on which Arthur fails, on which he 
makes a not quite human impression, a part of the pict- 
ure in decrying which the critics have some reason ? 
Yes, there is — but they have no cause to boast themselves 
of their acumen. What they say is not original. Ten- 
nyson himself has said it by the mouth of Guinevere, 
and it appears in the sayings of even the Knights of 
Arthur — of Gawain and Tristram, much more in the 
sayings of Vivien and of Mark. There is scarcely a 
single attack made by the critics on Arthur which has 
not been made by Tennyson himself. In fact, Arthur is 
a little superhuman, a little too out of the world, a little 
too easily deceived, a little too good for human nature's 
daily food. Tennyson made him so, and deliberately. 
"Why?" we ask; "there was no need. He would 
have had even more force as an ideal character, even 
more influence on us, if he had shared more in our 
humanity. Why did Tennyson superhumanise him ? " 

The real reason lay in the necessities of that allegory 
which Tennyson chose to infiltrate into his poem. He 
represents Arthur as a man, and when he does so, even 
when he makes him ideal in conduct and aim, the char- 
acter is just and clear and human. But he is forced by 
his allegory to paint him also as the rational soul, as an 
abstract idea, and whenever he does this Arthur steps 
outside of humanity, and that is naturally resented. At 



384 Tennyson 



all the points where Arthur represents the soul alone, 
Guinevere and the critics are right. He does want 
colour and warmth, he is too much outside of the world ; 
he is under-passioned, if I may coin a word ; and the 
demands of his perfection do not sufficiently consider 
the weakness of human nature. He loses life, and be- 
comes, in his allegorical form, the image only of a man. 
But because Tennyson was unfortunate enough as an 
artist to trouble his poem by making his chief character 
not only a man but an allegorical symbol, we have no 
right to transfer our impatience with the characteristics of 
the unhuman symbol to the ideal character of the man. 
Let us keep them separate. Nevertheless the artist 
ought not to have given us this trouble — ought not to 
have mixed up the man with the general notion of the 
soul of man. Arthur ought either to have been one 
thing or the other — either the rational Soul alone, or the 
man alone ; not sometimes one and sometimes the other. 
And in this Fassi?ig of Arthur he is so much the man 
and so little of the Soul that he pleases more than else- 
where in the book. Even in the great speech to Guine- 
vere in the last Idyll, the portions of it which are spoken 
by the King as the Soul in man contending with sense, 
lessen the humanity of those parts of it which are spoken 
from the man to the woman. 

But here in this Passing of Arthur he is altogether the 
man, and he is dear to us throughout. He feels his fail- 
ure in the great work he desired to do with the same self- 
pitifulness that many a high reformer has felt in the hour 



Idylls of the King 385 

of his death. I have already quoted the lines. They 
are full of humanity. They are not the voice of an 
abstract soul. And their wild cry at the end : 

My God, Thou hast forgotten me in my death ! 

is changed suddenly, as many a prophet's has been 
changed, into a cry of trust concerning his personal 
fate. 

Nay — God, my Christ — I pass but shall not die. 

Then, like many another leader of men, he dreams on 
the day before he dies — and the ghost of Gawain, blown 

Along a wandering wind, and past his ear 
Went shrilling, " Hollow, hollow, all delight ! 
Hail, King ! to-morrow thou shalt pass away. 
Farewell ! there is an isle of rest for thee." 

And the shrill voice fades away, likened in a noble simile 
to 

wild birds that change 

Their season in the night and wail their way 

From cloud to cloud ; 

and is imaginatively mingled with dim cries as of a city 

sacked at night, and Arthur wakes and thinks, like a 

poet, that all the Faery things that haunt the waste and 

wild mourn : for, when he goes, they too will go. 

This also is human to the core, and when, mournfully 

saying that to fight against his people is to fight against 

himself, and that their death is a death-stroke to him, 

he feels the love of his youth recur and its late misery 

darken the whole world, so that the mist in which he 
25 



386 Tennyson 

moves is made less by Nature than by his own sorrow 
for Guinevere : 

This blind haze 

which ever since I saw 
One lying in the dust at Almesbury, 
Hath folded in the passes of the world, 

he is still more one with whom we can feel as man to 
man. Then comes that noble passage of the fight in 
the dead mist upon the ocean-shore, on the sunset 
bound of Lyonnesse — in which the allegory recurs, but 
splendidly recurs, in veiled words which describe the 
whole battle ^f desperate humanity for life and faith 
and hope in the midst of its chill mystery — till with the 
falling night the North wind rose and the tide ; the mist 
dissolved, and Arthur saw none alive around him but 
Bedivere and the traitor Modred. A great voice then 
shakes the world — a noble imagination of Tennyson — 
and seems to waste the realm, and to beat confusion 
into Arthur's heart : 

I know not what I am, 
Nor whence I am, nor whether I be King. 
Behold, I seem but King among the dead. 

This, too, may be allegory, but the human element 
in it is stronger than the allegorical, and it goes home 
to the heart of the situation. Afterwards, in one last 
act of kinghood, when he slays the traitorous cause of 
all the woe, he passes for a moment out of his confusion 
into the full sense of his kinghood, of whom he is, and 



Idylls of the King 387 

whence he has come, and whither he is going. This is 
the fate of a man and the heart of a man, and after all 
our ethics and allegory, it is sweet and true to company 
with it. 

And then we enter into the old and beloved piece of 
poetry which we know so well — into the Morte d' Arthur, 
which we read first in 1842. It is led up to so well that 
we feel that the hand and heart that wrote it so many 
years ago have not failed in skill and the power to 
charm, that time has not robbed the poet of his lyre- 
playing. But when, being led up to it, we suddenly find 
ourselves in it, as in a land which of old we found 
lovely and rejoice to see it again, we are full of our 
earlier happiness. 

When first we read it, it seemed as if Romance, sitting 
ever young by her wild forest stream, were stretching 
out her arms, and bidding us leave this weary world for 
her delights. And when we read it again the ancient 
charm returns. For here, in this chivalric work, we are 
close throughout to the ancient tale. No allegory, no 
ethics, no rational Soul, no preaching symbolism, enter 
here, to dim, confuse, or spoil the story. Nothing is 
added which does not justly exalt the tale, and what is 
added is chiefly a greater fulness and breadth of human- 
ity, a more lovely and supreme Nature, arranged at 
every point to enhance into keener life the human feel- 
ings of Arthur and his knight, to lift the ultimate hour 
of sorrow and of death into nobility. Arthur is borne 
to a chapel nigh the field — 



388 Tennyson 

A broken chancel with a broken cross, 
That stood on a dark strait of barren land ; 
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one 
Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 

What a noble framework — and with what noble con- 
ciseness it is drawn ! And Arthur bids Bedivere take 
Excalibur, and throw it into the mere. Twice he leaves 
the King to throw it, and twice he hides it, thinking it 
shame to deprive the world of so glorious a sword. All 
the landscape — than which nothing better has been in- 
vented by any English poet — lives from point to point 
as if Nature herself had created it ; but even more alive 
than the landscape are the two human figures in it — Sir 
Bedivere standing by the great water, and Arthur lying 
wounded near the chapel, waiting for his knight. Take 
one passage, which to hear is to see the thing : 

So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he slept, 
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs. 
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men. 
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang 
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down 
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock. 
Came on the shining levels of the lake. 

Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks : 
" What hast thou seen, what heard ? " Bedivere an- 
swers : * 

* The second answer is changed — 

I heard the water lapping on the crag. 
And the long ripple washing in the reeds. 

Both of them have the modern note, especially in the adjectives ; 
but though they lose simplicity, they gain splendour. The words in 



Idylls of the King 389 

I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, 
And the wild water lapping on the crag. 

— lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns 
that I never stand in solitude beside their waters but I 
hear the verses in my heart. At the last he throws it. 
The great brand 

Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, 

And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, 

Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, 

Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 

By night, with noises of the Northern Sea. 

" So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur," and never 
yet in poetry did any sword, flung in the air, flash so 
superbly. 

The rest of the natural description is equally alive, 
and the passage where the sound echoes the sense, and 
Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs as he moves along the 
icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting, clashing 
sound as any to be found in Tennyson : 

Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves 
And barren chasms, and all to left and right 
The bare black cliflf clang'd round him, as he based 
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang 
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels. 

We hear all the changes on the vowel a — every sound 
of it used to give the impression — and then, in a mo- 
ment, the verse runs into breadth, smoothness, and vast- 
Malory are : " Syr, he sayd, I sawe no thynge but the waters wappe 
and wawes wanne." 



390 Tennyson 



ness : for Bedivere comes to the shore and sees the 
great water : 

And on a sudden, lo ! the level lake 
And the long glories of the winter moon, 

in which the vowel o in its changes is used as the vowel a 
has been used before. 

The questions and replies of Arthur and Bedivere, the 
reproaches of the King, the excuses of the knight, the 
sorrow and the final wrath of Arthur, are worthy of the 
landscape in which the poet has enshrined them. They 
are greater than the landscape, as they ought to be ; and 
the dominance of the human element in the scene is a 
piece of noble artist-work. Arthur is royal to the close, 
and when he passes away with the weeping Queens 
across the mere, unlike the star of the tournament he 
was of old, he is still the King. Sir Bedivere, left alone 
on the freezing shore, hears the King give his last mes- 
sage to the world. It is a modern Christian who speaks, 
but the phrases do not sound out of harmony with that 
which might be in Romance. Moreover, the end of the 
saying is of Avilion or Avalon — of the old heathen 
Celtic place where the wounded are healed and the old 
made young. 

Only then — with this recurirence to the ancient stories 
of the Irish land of youth, of the City of God to which 
Galahad went, and of the joy of the land ^/hcre Ogier 
voyaged when the wars of earth were over — only then, 
and with enough dimness not to jar, the allegory steals 



Idylls of the King 



391 



back again. Arthur is again the Soul of Man that 
seeks the fair country whence it came. Sir Bedivere 
cries out : 

" The King is gone." 
And there withal came on him the weird rhyme, 
' ' From the great deep to the great deep he goes. " 

Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint 
As from beyond the limit of the world, 
Like the last echo born of a great cry, 
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice 
Around a king returning from his wars. 




CHAPTER XI 
ENOCH ARDEN AND THE SEA-POETRY 

T^NOCH ARDEN is one of a series of narrative 
/ ^ poems by Tennyson, which have to do with or- 
dinary human life in a simple and quiet manner. 
Some, like Enoch Arden, deal with the whole life-story 
of a few persons. Some, like Aylmer's Field and The 
Gardener's Daughter^ tell the story of events in the 
midst of human life which lead to the misery or happi- 
ness of those involved in them. Some, like The Brook 
or Love a?id Duty^ tells the events of a day in which 
lovers are reconciled, or part for ever ; and some, like 
Sea Dreams^ tell of a sudden crisis coming on the life 
of men and women and making a crisis in the life of 
their soul. There are others, like The Sisters, but 
they may all be grouped as narrative poems written in 
blank verse, and we may call them Idylls of daily life. 
They stand apart by their form from the lyric poems 
which treat of the same human matters, but which nat- 
urally confine themselves to moments of life made in- 
tense by the passions. Their blank verse is of a special 

392 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 393 

kind. It has a natural freedom and simplicity which is 
not permissible in heroic blank verse such as the poet 
used in the Idylls of the Kmg or in the classical poems. 
Tennyson, who knew his art, is exceedingly strict about 
this difference. The blank verse of Enoch Arden is 
quite distinct, for example, from that used in The Pass- 
ing of Arthur. A great deal might be said on this mat- 
ter, but it belongs to a minuter criticism than is aimed at 
here, and, after all, his readers can hear the difference 
for themselves, if they possess an ear for poetry. If they 
do not, no explanation will do them any good. 

This narrative poem of simple life is different from 
that class of poems of which Tennyson may be said to 
have been the inventor — short dialogues or narration of 
dialogues in blank verse between three or four well- 
bred persons on topics of social interest, such as Audley 
Court^ Waiting for the Mail^ or The Golden Year — some- 
times delightful, sometimes too pedestrian, half-serious, 
half-humorous things, but the humour coarse-grained ; 
slowly-m.oving clouds of conversation touched here and 
there with the crimson of love. These things were 
wholly his own, and new ; but the narrative poem of 
daily life among the poor, like Enoch Arden^ was not 
new. We have it in the tales of Crabbe, and very 
plainly in that class of Wordsworth's poems of which 
Michael is the best representative. After Wordsworth, 
none of the greater poets took up this special subject 
or used its form of poetry. It is not made by Walter 
Scott, by Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Tennyson, who 



394 Tennyson 

had a great deal of Wordsworth's simplicity and rug- 
gedness, and also his power of seeing the deep things 
of human nature in the common life of man, saw the 
capabilities of this kind of subject, restored it to poetry, 
and enlarged its range and its variety in a way of which 
Wordsworth had no conception. He invented at least 
half a dozen new forms of it, but the form of which I 
now write is that in which Enoch Arden is written. It 
resembles that which Wordsworth used in Michael^ but 
Tennyson began this class of poetry with Dora. 

Dora seems absolutely simple, but it is not really so 
simple as Michael. It is, perhaps, a little too elaborately 
simple. When I say that Wordsworth's poems of this 
type are more simple than Dora^ I mean that the style 
Wordsworth uses is more in harmony with the homespun 
matter. The style of Michael does not draw attention 
to itself and away from the subject. The style of Dora^ 
in relation to its subject, is concise to a fault — so con- 
cise that it forces us to think of it as much as of the 
story. We are driven, in perhaps too critical a mood, 
to say : " The man who wrote this was not so full of 
the emotion of his tale as not to consider, somewhat too 
much, how briefly, with justice to poetry, he could put 
it. So far, he was losing emotion, and so far he has 
caused us, by compelling us to think of his conciseness, 
to lose emotion also." 

Moreover, this extreme brevity of representation is 
quite unlike the way in which life is conducted by the 
class of which he writes. The men and women of this 



1 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 395 

class live a delayed life. When their doings and say- 
ings are so condensely given as they are in Dora^ we 
are taken out of their atmosphere. Passion, it is true, 
at its height is brief, but the whole of life is not spent 
in passion ; and there ought in poems of this kind to be 
something which should draw the movement out, and 
fill up the time between the outbursts of strong emotion. 
The slowness in such lives of the ebb and flow of cir- 
cumstance ought to be impressed upon us. Even in 
the rapid rush of the Iliad^ and even in heroic life, 
Homer takes care that there should be some delay. 
Though the similes he uses are so connected with the 
main movement by their fitness to the things they illus- 
trate that swiftness is not lost, yet they also give us 
the sense that there is time to spare. They enable us 
to linger a little, even in the full tide of battle, as life 
lingers. Wordsworth hums along in Michael^ as 
Michael himself and his wife hummed slowly on in life. 
And though the lover of conciseness, when he reads 
Michael^ becomes somewhat indignant with Wordsworth, 
and though the poet himself seems sometimes dull, yet 
the story is deliberately told in this way by the artist 
in order that we may be kept in the mental climate of the 
shepherd-class of which he writes. Nor, indeed, at the 
end does he fail in the impression he wants to give. 
Michael remains a far more impressive thing than Dora. 
Wordsworth moves more closely in the life of which he 
speaks, and has lost himself in it, more than Tennyson. 
The question of style does not occur to him. The 



_..^W 



396 Tennyson 



style of Michael is formed by the subject itself. I think 
that Tennyson felt something of what I have said, for 
it is plain that Enoch Arden is written in quite a differ- 
ent manner from Dora. It is concise, of course ; 
Tennyson was always concise ; but Enoch Arden is not 
overconcise. The action of the piece, and the move- 
ment of the feelings of the persons in it, are delayed. 
There is repetition, there is enough talking over events 
to make us understand that years and years pass by. 
The atmosphere of a remote seaside hamlet, and of its 
life from day to day, is fully preserved and felt. We 
do not think, as we do when we read Dora^ of the style 
at all. It has come ; it is exactly right ; it has grown 
naturally out of the artist's profound feeling of his 
subject. Moreover, the verse is plain in sound, and 
takes pains to be like the talk of daily common life. It 
never rises into the heroic march save twice, once in the 
description of the tropic isle by day and night ; and 
again, when Enoch looks in at the window and sees his 
home in which he has no share. Ever^ the similes (in 
which a poet is allowed to soar a little) are restrained 
into simplicity. The things used in illustration belong 
to the same level of life to which the rest of the poem 
belongs. I quote two of them to show what I mean. 
Annie, wrapt in sorrow for Enoch's going, does not 
know of what he speaks : 

Heard and not heard him ; as the village girl, 
Who sets her pitcher underneath the spring, 
Musing on him who used to fill it for her. 
Hears and not hears, and lets it overflow. 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 397 

That is one — a rustic picture and a rustic heart fixed 
in four lines ; and this is another — born out of a sailor's 
life, and fitted in grave simplicity to the mighty relief 
of death : 

For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck 
See thro' the gray skirts of a lifting squall 
The boat that bears the hope of life approach 
To save the life despair'd of, than he saw 
Death dawning on him, and the close of all. 

Such is the atmosphere. 

There is not much of natural description in the poem. 
But Tennyson sets the scenery of the action in the first 
nine lines — 

Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm ; etc. 

They cannot be called a description of Nature. They 
make, as it were, the scenic background before which a 
drama is to be played, and this is all the poet intends 
them to represent. Two other scenes are laid, one 
where the wood feathers down to the hollow filled with 
hazels, where both Enoch and Philip tell their love to 
Annie ; and the other, the room in the cottage where 
we see Philip and Enoch's wife, and the garden without 
in the dark, whence Enoch looks through the window 
with a breaking heart. One other scene is set in the 
tropic isle where Enoch sits among the palms, gazing on 
the separating sea. This is the one distinct description 
of Nature in the poem, and, though it is good, it is not 
as good as another poet who sympathised more with 



398 Tennyson 



that type of Nature would have made it. Tennyson, I 
have said, was out of his element when he was away 
from England. And this description, with which he 
seems to have taken great pains, is not fused together by 
any feeling for the Nature described ; there is no colour 
in it but scarlet ; and the one line in it which is first-rate 
might have been written in Cornwall from sight : 

The league-long roller thundering on the reef. 

It is instructive to compare its emotionless * verses to 
those that follow, when Enoch in his hungry-hearted 
reverie sees in vision his native town, his native land. 
These are full of the very breath and passion of Eng- 
land • 

The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes, 
The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall, 
The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill 
November dawns and dewy-glooming downs. 
The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves. 
And the low moan of leaden-colour'ii seas. 

Nor can I omit the exquisite sentiment which sighs 
through Enoch's first sight of England, when all the 
quintessence of his native land and of her natural scen- 
•ery is wafted from the dim coast to the returning ship. 

* When I call these lines emotionless, I only mean that they are 
not thrilled with any affection for the scenery itself. They are full 
with another kind of emotion — of Enoch's misery, of his hatred for 
the incessant and foreign beauty of the land and sea. And it may be 
that the faint praise I give them ought to be, in another aspect, the 
fullest praise possible. Perhaps the poet made them cold that he 
might express the weary anger of Enoch's heart. 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 399 

In these visions of his country — for surely Tennyson 

himself is speaking here — he is unequalled in English 

poetry. 

His fancy fled before the lazy wind 
Returning, till beneath a clouded moon 
He like a lover down thro' all his blood 
Drew in the dewy meadowy morning-breath 
Of England, blown across her ghostly wall. 

As to the humanity of the poem, he that runs may 
read it. It also is kept at a quiet level, but it is none 
the less impressive. It never breaks into sensation ; 
not even when Enoch returns to see his wife married to 
another, and his children with another father. Nor has 
Tennyson any special ethical aim in what he writes. 
His work springs straight out of the situation. Enoch, 
Philip, Annie could not have acted otherwise — once we 
see their character. How easy it seems, as we read it, 
to do this well ! How supremely difficult it is except 
for an artist who has loved his art for years ! 

It is with an art charged with humanity that the intro- 
duction to the poem prophesies the whole action of the 
poem by the play of the children on the beach. In the 
narrow cave the children keep house. Enoch was host 
one day, Philip the next, while Annie still was mistress. 
" This is my house, and this my little wife," cries 
Enoch. " Mine too," said Philip, " turn and turn 
about." And when they quarrelled, 

The little wife would weep for company, 
And pray them not to quarrel for her sake, 
And say she would be little wife to both. 




400 Tennyson 

The childhood's play contains the fate of the men and 
women. This is well-shaped, skilful composition. 

Step by step, on these simple lines, the story grows. 
The passage where Philip sees Enoch speak to Annie, 
and slips aside like a wounded life into the hollows of 
the wood, is beautiful, alike for the joy and the sorrow 
described in it, and for its simple gravity of style. Yet it 
is only one of many passages full of that quiet strength 
of emotion which belongs to lowly English life, and 
especially to those who live on the sea-board. We do 
not feel, at first reading of the poem — owing to its care- 
ful lowness of note — the force with which Tennyson has 
grasped the humanity of his subject, but we do feel a 
vague impression of it. Afterwards the vague impres- 
sion becomes a conviction of extraordinary power. But 
of course the full humanity of the poem gathers round 
the return of Enoch to find his wife Philip's wife, and 
his own children Philip's children. And Tennyson, 
without transgressing his per ^eful limit, is steadily equal 
to the central emotion of the tale. 

As Enoch draws homeward to meet his tragedy, nature 
sympathises with him. The sea-haze shrouds the world 
in gray, the holt is withered, the robin pipes disconso- 
late. Thicker the drizzle grew, deeper the gloom. At 
last the town " flares on him in a mist-blotted light." 
He heard at the inn the doom which had happened to 
him, and stole out to look at his home in the sad No- 
vember dark. And while he stood without the cottage, 
clothed in the gloom, he saw wife and children and 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 401 



friends happy in the genial light. It was difficult to 
describe the passion in the lonely man ; it was still more 
difficult to keep him true to the highest in his character, 
to his staid and sacred sense of duty resting on love, in 
this terrible hour ; but Tennyson does it with concen- 
trated power. The poet is as nobly self-controlled as 
the character he draws. 

Now when the dead man come to life beheld 
His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe 
Hers, yet not his, upon the father's knee, 
And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness, 
And his own children tall and beautiful, 
And him, that other, reigning in his place, 
Lord of his rights and of his children's love, — 
Then he, tho' Miriam Lane had told him all, 
Because things seen are mightier than things heard, 
Stagger'd and shook, holding the branch, and fear'd 
To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry, 
Which in one moment, like the blast of doom, 
Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth. 

The last three lines lift the description into the lofty 
tragic note. Nor is the^' close less nobly conceived. 
Enoch might have died a miserable man, shattered by 
his fate, and our pity for him been charged with a sor- 
rowful contempt for human nature. But this is not in 
the bond. Like the epic hero, he conquers fate. The 
soul triumphs. He is more of the hero than Arthur : 

He was not all unhappy. His resolve 
Upbore him, and firm faith, and evermore 
Prayer from a living source within the will, 
And beating up thro' all the bitter world. 
Like fountains of sweet water in the sea, 
Kept him a living soul. 
26 




4o^ Tennyson 

The whole of his self-sacrifice is accomplished, and at 
the end the poet uses splendidly a common legend of 
the sea-coast. He brings all the mighty Ocean into 
Enoch's chamber at the hour of death to glorify him 
with its sympathy. On the third night after he left his 
message for his people, 

There came so loud a calling of the sea, 

that he awoke and died. 

This is Tennyson's one long poem about the poor, for 
Enoch is always a poor man. And it is characteristic of 
him that he chooses for his hero among the working- 
classes one who belongs to the sea rather than the land, 
a fisherman and then a merchant sailor ; for, next to his 
own sweet, soft English southern land, he loved the sea. 
He saw it day by day for a great part of his life from 
his home in the Isle of Wight. It dwelt in his observing 
imagination, and he knew, all along the coast, its moods 
and fantasies, its steadiness and its changes, its ways of 
thinking and feeling and acting, as a man knows his 
wife. But he loved it, not only for itself, but for the 
sake of the English folk that sailed upon it, whose au- 
dacity and constancy had made England the mistress of 
the Deep. He loved it also as a part of England and 
her Empire. Wherever over all the oceans Tennyson's 
imagination bore him, he felt that there, from tropic to 
pole and from pole to tropic, he was in England. His 
love of country and his love of the sea were fused into 
one passion : 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 403 

Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable, 
Thine the lands of lasting summer, many-blossoming Paradises, 
Thine the North and thine the South and thine the battle-thun- 
der of God. 

So chanted the prophetesses in Boadicea concerning a 
future England with which they had but little national 
concern, but in reality Tennyson is singing in these 
splendid lines his own English folk and their glory ; and 
I cannot finish this chapter better than by gathering 
together the greater part of what he says about English 
seamen and the English sea. It forms a special element 
in his work. 

Enoch — to speak first of him — is the type of the 
" able seamen " of England, nourished in the fishing- 
smack, and then passing from land to land through the 
wonders of the waves in the merchant-vessel ; and then, 
when wars arise, the mainstay of our navies — a type 
which has lasted more than a thousand years. Arden's 
godfearingness is not uncommon in English seamen, 
but his slow-established sense of duty is common ; and 
so are also his sturdy endurance, his settled self-sacrifice 
for those ideas that his soul approves, his courage un- 
conscious of itself, his silent love of his country — a 
careful, loving, and faithful picture, for which we have 
to honour the poet. Nowhere has he shown more 
convincingly the noblest side of his patriotism. 

We have another type in Sir Richard Grenville, 
painted in that ringing and high-angered ballad — the 
fight of The Revenge. The soul of the Elizabethan age 




404 Tennyson 

and of its great adventures, its hatred of Spain, its bold 
sea-captains who laughed the impossible to scorn, even 
the very ballad-music of the time, inform that ballad, 
which dashes along like the racing billows of the sea. 
Nor is the mystic element of the sea and ships absent 
from it in the end. The Revenge herself is alive, and 
does not desire to live when she has an alien crew. 

And away she sail'd with her loss and lo?tged for her own^ 

is a line of pure imagination. And the great ocean and 
the sky feel with the ship — they, too, are English ; no 
English boat, they think, shall belong to Spain — and 
they bury The Reve?ige in the fathomless main by the 
island crags. This is a noble close to a ballad which, 
while the sea endures, the sea-wolves of England will 
love to hear. 

The Sailor Boy enshrines another type ; nay, rather, 
it is a concentration into a short poem of the temper of 
all seamen in lands where the sea is loved. It holds in 
it the sailor's sense of the dangers of the deep, of the 
woes and weariness of his life, of his wonder that he can 
endure them, of his wish to stay on land, of his super- 
stitious terror, of his lonely death in the homeless 
waves or on the cruel shore ; and, as we read, we hear 
the long cry which began with the first poetry of Eng- 
land ; and which Tennyson also placed on the lips of 
the Greeks who were almost as eager seamen as the 
English : 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 405 

Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, 
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. 

We have had enough of action, and of motion we, 

Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething 

free, 
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. 

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar ; 
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. 

But there is also in The Sailor Boy that fierce and keen 
attraction, that Siren-singing of the sea, as of beauty 
hiding horror in it, which, pulling at the hearts of 
English sailors, dragged them forth from their quiet 
hamlets under the cliff ; whose voice drew Drake round 
the Horn and Frobisher to the Arctics, and a million 
hardy souls into every recess of the wide ocean, to live 
and die in adventure and in trading, in treasure-hunting 
and battle-hunting, in discovery, and in undying imagi- 
nation. This also comes down to us from poetry more 
than a thousand years ago. Those who will read The 
Seafarer, a Northumbrian poem of the eighth or ninth 
century, will hear, through its strangely modern note, 
this double music of the sea, its two cries of repulsion 
and attraction which may perhaps mingle into one 
voice in that allurement of danger, which is more felt, 
I think, by seamen than by any other class of men. 
The Sailor Boy embodies all these elements of feel- 
ing. I refer my readers to it. To quote a part of it 
would spoil it ; to quote the whole of it would not be fair. 




4o6 Tennyson 



Again and again this wild attraction of the Unknown 
in the deep sea is expressed by Tennyson. It breathes 
underneath the Ulysses. I have suffered greatly, cries 
Ulysses, and enjoyed greatly, on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
Vext the dim sea — 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It lives in The Voyage, that delightful poem, with its 
double meaning, half of the life on the sea and half of 
the life of the soul, and wholly of those who, like sea- 
men, have no care for business and science and the real 
world ; who race after the undiscovered shore, who fol- 
low the gleam, who live for ideas, not for things. The 
same desire is at the root of the invention of Ten- 
nyson concerning the passing away of Galahad, who 
seeks the sacred and golden city, not on land, as in the 
original, but by sailing over the untravelled seas ; and, 
finally, the full yearning of the seaman for the discovery 
of new lands after patient sailing on the huge wastes of 
the ocean, and his rapture in the first sight of them, 
break forth in the true extravagance of the only entirely 
noble lines in the Columbus : 

Who push'd his prows into the setting sun, 
And made west east, and sail'd the Dragon's mouth, 
And came upon the Mountain of the World, 
And saw the rivers roll from Paradise. 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 407 

As to the great creature herself, the Woman of our 
universe — the soft, cruel, reckless, restless, delightful, and 
terrible mistress of the land — she lives in a changeful 
variety through the poetry of Tennyson, but she lives 
only on the coast. With his turn for truth, for writing 
only of what he had observed, he does not take us into 
the deep ocean, save in one stanza of In Memoriam^ in 
The Voyage^ and in a few scattered lines.* He rarely 
goes beyond the edge of the cliff or the margent of the 
beach. But he describes there the manners of the great 
waters with far more accuracy than any other of the by- 
gone poets. His whole eyes were given to see truly and 
vividly, and all his imagination to record with joy, the 
doings of the billows on the land. It may be well to 
bring some of these together. Most of them are of the 
waves racing in upon the coast, and breaking on the 
cliffs or up the beach. The first of these I choose is in 
The Lover's Tale^ and the manner of it is already Tenny- 
son's own : 

The slowly ridging rollers on the cliffs 
Clash'd, calling to each other. 

" Deep calleth unto deep " saith the Psalm. This ridg- 
ing of the billows is a favourite image, and he generally 
mingles it with the breaking down of the ridges into 

* Here is one noble passage of wave-tossing in fierce wind on the 
outer sea : 

As a wild wave in the wide North Sea 
Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all 
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies. 



4o8 Tennyson 



cataracts — a word he uses to suggest the roar and white- 
ness of the waters as they fall : 

Tho' heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea 
Drove like a cataract, and all the sand 
Swept like a river. 

The Holy Grail. 

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts. 

Locksley Hall. 

Those who have walked on the Lido near Venice, when 

a tempest was blowing, know what Tennyson meant by 

the sweeping river of the sand. The dry grains stream 

past in a continuous cloud, as thick as torrent rain. 

Another time he sees a different effect of wind over wet 

sand : * 

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand 
Torn from the fringe of spray. 

He hears " the shingle grinding in the surge," and " the 
scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the 
wave " ; but sees, with equal truth, the soft upcoming of 
the peaceful swell on the smooth, flat sand — " dappled 
dimplings of the wave " ; or 

the crisping ripples on the beach 
And tender curving lines of creamy spray. 

Or with the sad creatures in Despair^ waits 

Till the points of the foam in the dusk came playing about 
our feet. 

He looks on a nobler, larger aspect of the waters out- 
spreading over distant, shallow sands — when from " the 
lazy-plunging sea " 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 409 

the great waters break 
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud. 

Or, once more, he lies on the shore to watch 

the curl'd white of the coming wave 
Glass'd in the slippery sand before it breaks. 

He has seen with no less force the wave breaking on 
the cliffs, and heard its roar with a no less attentive ear. 
Into the cove at Tintagil comes a ninth wave, which, 

gathering half the deep 
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged 
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame. 

- And the fringe 
Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand 
Lash'd at the wizard as he spake the word. 
And all at once all round him rose in fire. 

This splendid piece of phosphoric sea is matched by the 
tidal-wave in Sea Dreams scaling the cliffs and explod- 
ing in the caves. When a wave fills a cave the com- 
pressed air bursts out like a clap of thunder : 

But while the two were sleeping, a full tide 

Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks 

Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild sea-smoke, 

And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell 

In vast sea-cataracts — ever and anon 

Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs 

Heard thro' the living roar. 

A similar thunder is recorded in the Palace of Art^ where 

the billows 

roar rock- thwarted under bellowing caves 
Beneath the windy wall. 



4IO Tennyson 



Then he describes not only the noise, but the still ad- 
vance of the windless swell into and through the cavern : 

As on a dull day in an ocean cave 

The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 

In silence. 

He does not often speak of the great calm. There are 
the tropic lines in Maud : 

Half-lost in the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea, 
The silent, sapphire-spangled, marriage-ring of the land. 

There is that passage in Enoch Arden when the Pacific 
lies outspread and blazing in the sun, but even that is 
made alive by 

The league-long roller thundering on the reef. 

There are the lines in the Princess^ where the Prince 
sees in vision 

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight, swell 
On some dark shore just seen that it was rich. 

This is the only calm sea-moonlight I remember in the 
poems. That lovely metaphor in Maudy 

If a hand as white 
As ocean-foam in the moon, 

borders upon storm ; and so does the only other moon- 
lighted sea I can recall — a very jewel of truth and im- 
agination : 

A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand, 
Left on the shore ; that hears all night 

The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
Their moon-led waters white. 



Enoch Arden and the Sea-Poetry 411 



And once at least we see in a lovely verse of the poem 
to F. D. Maurice, the Channel and the ships ; 

Where, if below the milky steep 
Some ship of battle slowly creep, 

And on thro' zones of light and shadow 
Glimmer away to the lonely deep. 

One Other sea-piece, amid all these collected aspects 
of observant truth, I myself saw realised. I used to 
think that the phrase " wrinkled sea," in the fragment 
called The Eagle^ was too bold. But one day I stood 
on the edge of the cliff below Slieve League in Donegal. 
The cliff from which I looked down on the Atlantic was 
nine hundred feet in height. Besides me the giant slope 
of Slieve League plunged down from its summit for 
more than eighteen hundred feet. As I gazed down on 
the sea below which was calm in the shelter, for the wind 
blew off the land, the varying puffs that eddied in and 
out among the hollows and juttings of the cliffs covered 
the quiet surface with an infinite network of involved 
ripples. It was exactly Tennyson's wrinkled sea. 
Then, by huge good fortune, an eagle which built on 
one of the ledges of Slieve League, flew out of his 
eyrie and poised, barking, on his wings ; but in a mo- 
ment fell precipitate, as their manner is, straight down a 
thousand feet to the sea. And I could not help crying 
out ; 

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 

He watches from his mountain walls, 

And like a thunderbolt he falls. 



CHAPTER XII 

aylmer's field, sea dreams, the brook 

A YLMERS FIELD seems from one point of 
^~~\ view to have been written as a contrast to Enoch 
Arden. Enoch Arden was a tale of humble life 
and of a fisherman's self-sacrifice. Aylmer's Field is a 
tale of a life on a higher social level, and of the other 
than self-sacrifices hag-ridden persons in it sometimes 
make. Enoch sacrificed himself for the sake of those 
he loved. Sir Aylmer sacrificed his daughter and his 
friend for the sake of his sickly pride. Enoch dies, 
Sir Aylmer dies, but the one leaves tenderness and 
happiness behind him and the other bitterness and 
desolation. The law of Love with its sanctions is em- 
bodied in these two quiet tales ; is gathered round 
simple circumstances, and is woven in and out with 
common human passions made mean or exalted in 
various characters. The stories are set in carefully 
painted scenery, and are lit and warmed by a steadily 
burning fire of imagination. 

But though this doctrine of love arises from both 
412 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 413 

poems (in one of which its fulfilment is shown and in 
the other its negation) the poems themselves cannot 
be accused of a conscious ethical aim. Their driving- 
power is not morality, but the love of human nature and 
the desire not to make beautiful its outgoings. Moreover, 
if Tennyson had aimed at the truth that self-forgetfulness 
is the mother of Life and self-remembrance the mother 
of Death, he would still have done his work within an 
artist's sphere. For that truth is spiritual, not moral. Its 
doings belong to impulses of love arising freely from 
within, not to laws of conduct imposed from without. 
As such, it is a subject fitted for art, and the fact is that 
the impression made by both these poems is first and 
foremost an art-impression. 

The next thing to say is that Aylmej^'s Field is not so 
good a piece of art as Enoch Arden. It is not so much at 
unity with itself. It ranges too quickly from simplicity 
to sensationalism, and the sensational elements become 
more and more sensational. And Tennyson was entirely 
out of his element in this realm of writing. The sensa- 
tional was not native to his character, and when an artist 
steps outside of his character into a kind of art for which 
he is naturally unfitted, he is sure to overstrain the effort 
he makes. The art of a flamboyant writer has its 
native limits, its native rules. When a writer who has 
nothing flamboyant (and I apologise for this term) in 
his nature, attempts that kind of literary architecture, 
he exceeds its limits and he breaks its rules. This is 
the case in Aylmers Field. The dagger business is too 



414 Tennyson 

like a novel. The wrath of Sir Aylmer when he drives 
out Leolin is more violent than even the weakness of 
his character permits. The sermon, though just possi- 
ble, is quite improbable. The scene in the church is 
more than the poetic stage on which the tale is written 
is capable of bearing. The suicide is feebler than 
the hero, feeble as he is. In fact, the hero is too light 
a person to choose for a poem of this kind, but if he be 
chosen, he ought to be made more worthy of manhood, 
and of the girl he loves. He should have at least one 
parenthesis of strength in his life. It is not that the 
characters are out of nature, their conduct is fully pos- 
sible. But from the point of view of art, they just over- 
step the edge of the natural — a little too violent, a 
little too solemn, a little too weak for their characters as 
drawn at the beginning, a little more extreme than the 
motives permit. 

In Enoch Arden a strong character dominates the 
piece, and the prevalent overshadowing of this one char- 
acter (even during his ten years of absence) binds the 
whole poem into unity. In Aylmer's Field^ no character 
is dominant, and only circumstances connect the person- 
ages. The girl alone, and she passes through the action 
almost like a painted dream, leaves much impression on 
the heart. But separately, the portraiture is effective. 
Since the characters do not weave themselves together, 
we are the more forced to look at them apart from one 
another, like pictures on a wall. From that point of 
view they are full of interest, worthy of study, and real- 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 415 

ised here and there in single lines with a master's pencil. 
When it is said of Edith that she was — 

bounteously made, 
And yet so finely that a troublous touch 
Thinn'd, or would seem to thin her in a day, 

we are made, in a word, to feel the girl through and 
through. Not less subtle and clean-edged are the por- 
traits of Sir Aylmer, of his wife, of the Indian cousin 
who flashes in and out of the hall, of Leolin himself in 
his petulant love, his foaming wrath, and his shrill suicide, 
of the parson prophesying against the world to relieve 
his own indignant misery, and of the parents smitten at 
last to the quick of their pride, and staggering home to 
die. These are admirable, but they would have been 
more admirable had they all been wrought together. 

And the result, the emotional impression left behind 
by this work of art, is not of humanity rising above the 
fates of life by dint of love, but of humanity crushed by 
the fates of life because of self-thought. The impression 
we receive is one of human weakness and nothing else, 
and it belongs to every one of the characters. No 
doubt, an artist can feel such a subject, but is it worth 
his while to take it ? It does not purify the imagination 
from fear of life, from contempt of humanity, or from 
petty anger with the common destinies of man. It does 
not set free high emotion. We are left in the common 
not the exalted world, in the sphere of social ethics, not in 
the spiritual sphere of art. 

I cannot help thinking that Tennyson was half-con- 



41 6 Tennyson 



scious of this, that he was not content with his piece, 
but did not like to surrender it, and therefore that he 
laboured on it, in order to use it, for a long time. There 
is an extraordinary excellence of workmanship in many 
parts of his poem, as if he had toiled by exquisiteness of 
technic to redeem its general failure. The description 
of Edith at the beginning, and that which Averill makes 
of her in his sermon at the close touches her as if with a 
pencil of delicate sunshine. 

For her fresh and innocent eyes 
Had such a star of morning in their blue, 
That all neglected places of the field 
Broke into nature's music when they saw her. 

And the rest is almost equal to that. Moreover, Tenny- 
son has enshrined the story in lovely English scenery. 

A land of hops and poppy-mingled corn, 
Little about it stirring save a brook ! 

are lines not to be forgotten by Kentish men who love 
their county. This description also which follows is 
scarcely bettered in all his work, full as it is of long and 
meditative love of the cottages of England seen from 
the outside, garlanded with flowers, sleeping like sheep 
upon the green roadside — 

For out beyond her lodges, where the brook 
Vocal, with here and there a silence, ran 
By sallowy rims, arose the labourers' homes. 

Her art, her hand, her counsel all had wrought 
About them : here was one that, summer-blanch'd, 
Was parcel-bearded with the traveller's joy 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 417 

In autumn, parcel ivy-clad ; and here 

The warm-blue breathings of a hidden hearth 

Broke from a bower of vine and honeysuckle : 

One look'd all rose-tree, and another wore 

A close-set robe of jasmine sown with stars : 

This had a rosy sea of gillyflowers 

About it ; this, a milky-way on earth, 

Like visions in the Northern dreamer's heavens, 

A lily-avenue climbing to the doors ; 

One, almost to the martin-haunted eaves, 

A summer burial deep in hollyhocks ; 

Each its own charm ; and Edith's everywhere. 

This picture, so careful in thought and sight, so skil- 
ful in words, and so full of light and flower-opulence, is 
worthy of the closest study ; but even that, and the 
piteous and beautiful lines in which the agony of two 
young hearts and the wild weeping of the storm are 
woven together, do not redeem the whole. 

So they talk'd. 
Poor children, for their comfort : the wind blew ; 
The rain of heaven, and their own bitter tears, 
Tears, and the careless rain of heaven, mixt 
Upon their faces, as they kiss'd each other 
In darkness, and above them roar'd the pine. 

Even these, and the last six lines of the poem, full of 
the life of Nature which lived the more when Aylmer's 
field was desolate of all the Aylmers, are not, lovely and 
true as they are, more than purple patches on a robe ill- 
woven. 

I have also sometimes thought that Tennyson did not 
quite relish making an attack on the things he loved so 

well ; on long descent and pictured ancestry, on that 
27 



41 8 Tennyson 



pride of name and lands and fitting wedlock, which the 
squires of England cherish. These things he loved, 
when they were not inhuman. When they made men 
and women inhuman, he denounced them as heartily 
as any Republican, for he was a poet, and Love with 
him was first. But when a man denounces the extremes 
of what he likes, he is liable to represent those extremes 
too darkly, to make them worse than they are, lest he 
should be thought to attack the real thing. And in this 
poem the representation is greatly exaggerated. What 
Sir Aylmer does is iniquitous, more because of the cir- 
cumstances than because of his pride of birth and wealth. 
I do not believe that the Squire in the prologue oi The Prin- 
cess — " the great broad-shouldered genial Englishman " 
— would have yielded Lilia to the Parson's brother, with 
any patience, if she were his only daughter and the heir- 
ess of his lands. But Lilia's father would not have been 
a spy on his daughter, nor thought that she was his chat- 
tel ; and he would have behaved like a gentleman, even 
when he dismissed Leolin. But he would have been as 
proud as Sir Aylmer, only in a more sensible way. It is not 
really pride of birth which Tennyson attacks, but things 
in the man which do not belong to a gentleman — ill-bred 
and dishonourable ways of acting — things which pride of 
ancestry would forbid another man to do. Tennyson's 
attack is not really levelled against the class or its 
qualities, but against a discreditable member of the 
class ; not against rank and privilege or pride in them, 
but against the inhumanity, the meanness, the narrow 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 419 

conventions, which the diseased extreme of pride of 
birth produces and supports. It is not, to take another 
instance, Lady Clara Vere de Vere's pride of rank to 
which he objects, but the inhuman ways of her pride. 
Moreover, as a poet — whose heart, always moved by 
pure and lovely maidenhood, kept with great beauty and 
devotion his youthful ideal of womanhood untouched 
and unreproved, and who shaped it in many sweet and 
lovely maids with a delicate tenderness never to be 
forgotten — Tennyson hated the tyranny of parents who 
sold their daughters, and Aylmers Field and many 
another poem record his steady indignation with this 
iniquity. 

Sea Dreams (which in the volume of 1864 follows 
Ayhner's Field) is not a narrative of years and of 
many characters, but of a single day in the life of a 
man and his wife, and of a crisis in their souls. 
The man is a city clerk who has been cheated of all his 
savings by a hypocrite ; and who visits the seaside with 
his wife and infant after the loss has fallen upon him. 
They wander on the shore, and at evening the tide rises 
with a huge swell and thunder. The mighty sound flows 
through their sleep, and, with their circumstances, 
makes their dreams. The dreams stir their hearts — his 
to added bitterness, hers to solemn thought — and she 
asks her husband to forgive the injurer. ** No," he cries. 
" No ?" she answers ;" yet the robber died to-day. I 
would you had forgiven." " Why," he replies, " because 



420 Tennyson 



he is dead, should I forgive ? Yet, for the child sleeps 
sweetly, and that you may happily sleep, I do forgive." 
That is the little tale, but few poems in the work of 
Tennyson are done with a finer art, or built up with a 
nobler imagination. Moreover the humanity, in both 
the senses of the word, is varied, vivid, wise, and tender. 
The city clerk, gently born and bred ; his wife, than whom 
Tennyson has scarcely drawn a more gracious woman — her 
grace the grace of Jesus Christ — the heated preacher who 
proclaims the overthrow of Babylon ; the pious cheat, 
" so false he partly took himself for true," and the happy 
little child whose cradle rocks to the tune of a song that 
motherhood herself might have written — are all here, 
five distinct images of humanity. Each of them is 
touched by a poet's wisdom of love. When the hypo- 
crite is met and challenged in the street, the clerk looks 
after him and 

Among the honest shoulders of the crowd, 
Read rascal in the motions of his back, 
And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee.* 

But, scoundrel as he is, the heavenly pity of the woman 
leads us to pity him at the end. 

Not less clear and delicate, in another kind, is this 

* Mr. Woolner, talking one day about this poem, told me that 
when he was making his bust of Carlyle, a man well known on 
'Change came in, and that, after he had gone away, Carlyle said, 
' ' That man is a rascal ; I read it in the motions of his back — a 
scoundrel ; did you see his supple-sliding knee ? " Woolner told 
this story to Tennyson, and Tennyson reproduced it in this happy 
way. Carlyle was right ; the man, a few years afterwards, was 
guilty of felony. 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 42 1 

lovely pictrue where husband, wife, and child are woven 
together into one love in the silence of the night. 

Saying this, 
The woman half turn'd round from him she loved, 
Left him one hand, and reaching thro' the night 
Her other, found (for it was close beside) 
And half-embraced the basket cradle-head 
With one soft arm, which, like the pliant bough 
That moving moves the nest and nestling, sway'd 
The cradle, while she sang this baby song — 

The wisdom of love in the forgiveness of injury be- 
longs to the other sense of the word humanity, and this 
humanity pleading for gentleness to wrong-doing is the 
one motive which makes the poetic unity of this poem. 
It swells into fulness, like the tide, from the beginning 
to the end of Sea Dreams. It is in the heart of the 
woman ; its contrast is seen in the cruel preacher, its 
need in the death of the hypocrite, its victory in the for- 
giveness which the injured man bestows at last, its clos- 
ing peace in the sweet sleep of husband, wife, and child. 
Correlative with this, and binding the poem into unity 
by its all-pervading presence from without, as forgive- 
ness by its presence from within, is the fulness of the 
sea which everywhere inundates the poem, first seen by 
them as they walked 

Lingering about the thymy promontories, 
Till all the sails were darken'd in the west 
And rosed in the east ; 

then heard, and waking them from sleep, when the full 
tide rose, breaking on the cliffs and thundering in the 



422 Tennyson 



caves ; and lastly, seen in imagination, full watered, 
underneath the quiet stars. But before they had awak- 
ened, its solemn noise had entered the debatable land 
between slumber and waking, and made their dreams. 
The dreams are woven out of their story and the prob- 
lem of life that belonged to it, but the sea is their crea- 
tor and their explainer. Thus, from without, the Ocean 
Presence makes also the unity of the poem. The man 
dreams of life and honest work and of his speculation, 
in a beautiful invention through which the sea breathes 
and flows. But the wife, since her soul was in a higher 
land, dreamed a nobler dream, in which the vast tide, 
swelling with a spheric music, surges wave after wave 
on cliffs that in the vision take the form of huge cathe- 
dral fronts of every age, and breaks them down. Un- 
derneath, among their ruins, men and women wrangled ; 
but their " wildest wailings " (and this is a conception 
equally noble and beautiful) " were never out of tune " 
with the sweet low note which swelled and died and 
swelled again in the belt of luminous vapour, whence 
the billows rolled ashore to sweep the cathedral fronts 
away. Thus, below the wrangle of creeds, eternal Love 
abides, even in the hearts of unloving men. At last, 
only the Virgin and Child remain ; and though they 
totter, they, like the love they represent, are not seen to 
fall. That dream, quaintly wrought as by the imagina- 
tion working without the will, in sleep, is of the Ocean, 
worthy of the Ocean's soul, and worded like the Ocean's 
voice. 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 423 

The passage is too long to quote, but there are few 
finer things in the literature of visions of the sea, save 
perhaps the dream of Wordsworth recorded in the fifth 
book of The Prelude. It would almost seem as if 
Tennyson had built his dream in rivalry of Words- 
worth's ; but sublime as it is, Wordsworth's is more sub- 
lime ; and well composed as it is, Wordsworth's is better 
composed. The sea is also mighty in Wordsworth's 
vision, and the barren sands T)n which he fell asleep are 
changed into the great desert, over which the tide en- 
croaches to overwhelm the world. The Arab rider in it 
is born out of Don Quixote, whose adventures the poet 
was reading, and the stone and the shell the Arab holds 
in his hand are two books, two great universes of human 
power, for both of which Wordsworth had the highest 
reverence — the universe of geometric truth, and the 
universe of poetry — 

The one that held acquaintance with the stars, 
And wedded soul to soul in purest bond 
Of reason, undisturbed by space or time ; 
The other that was a god, yea many gods, 
Had voices more than all the winds, with power 
To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe 
Through every clime, the heart of human kind. 

Meanwhile, as the Arab rode to save these two books 
from the drowning of the world, and the poet kept pace 
with him, his countenance grew more disturbed — 

And, looking backwards when he looked, mine eye 

Saw, over half the wilderness diffused, 

A bed of glittering light : I asked the cause : 



424 Tennyson 



" It is," said he, '* the waters of the deep 
Gathering upon us " ; quickening then the pace 
Of the unwieldly creature he bestrode, 
He left me : I called after him aloud ; 
He heeded not ; but, with his twofold charge 
Still in his grasp, before me, full in view, 
Went hurrying o'er the illimitable waste. 
With the fleet waters of a drowning world 
In chase of him ; whereat I waked in terror. 
And saw the sea before me, and the book, 
In which I had been reading, at my side. 
♦ 

Both dreams are raised into sublimity by the thoughts 
they represent, and both illustrate the powers of Words- 
worth and Tennyson when they are writing at a high 
pitch of imaginative insight. 

There are two other great sea-dreams in English 
poetry. One is the vision of Clarence, far the most 
splendid and passionate as poetry ; the other is the 
vision of the bottom of the great deep in the Prometheus 
Unbound — a magnificent enlargement of the dream of 
Clarence. But by weight of thought and height of aim, 
thrilled, as both of them are, by sympathy with the 
wants of mankind, the sea-dreams of Wordsworth and 
Tennyson are greater than Shelley's, and may even stand 
side by side with Shakespeare's, not by their poetic, but 
by their intellectual fire. 

To return to Tennyson : this poem illustrates the 
range of his power. He passes easily from this large 
vision of the great deep of Eternal Love, destroying 
those impermanent forms of religion over which men 
quarrel, to the small and quiet picture, at the close, of 



Aylmer s Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 425 

the cradled infant and the mother. Few would dare to 
set them together, still fewer would have had the power 
to write both so perfectly. 

We have a much fuller example of this variety of 
range in the poem of The Brook. It also is knit to- 
gether into its brief space with delightful skill. Law- 
rence Aylmer, after twenty years of absence, returning 
from the East to see his native place, stays his steps at a 
stile, beside the babbling brook which joins the river 
near old Philip's farm. There, he remembers his 
younger brother, the poet who died, but who sang the 
rhyme of the brook he now recalls. There, too, he re- 
members Katie Willows, Philip's daughter, for whose 
petitioning grace of sweet seventeen he endured old 
Philip's chatter for many hours, that she might have 
time to make up her quarrel with her lover James — till, 
returning, worn with talk, he found 

the sun of sweet content 
Re-risen in Katie's eyes, and all things well. 

And then he thinks how all are gone — Philip dead ; his 
brother dead ; Katie and James away in Australia — and 
bows his head over the brook. 

The story is thus happily and easily wrought, but the 
end shows even greater skill. He lifts his eyes and sees 
Katie over again come to him along the path, and all 
the twenty years fade away. Amazed, and like one who 
half waking feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream, 
he cries 



426 Tennyson 



' * Too happy, fresh and fair, 

Too fresh and fair in our sad world's best bloom, 
To be the ghost of one who bore your name 
About these meadows, twenty years ago." 

" Have you not heard ? " said Katie, " we came back, 
We bought the farm we tenanted before. 
Am I so like her? so they said on board." 

And the daughter brings him in to be welcomed by the 
mother in the ancient farm. So does the poet bring the 
past and present into one, and leave the solitary man 
among old friends. It is an end imagined with much 
grace, and it brings the whole into a pretty unity. 
Moreover, as the sea, swelling through Sea Dreams^ 
binds that poem, from without, into unity by its uni- 
versal presence, so here the brook, glancing, glimmering, 
and singing everywhere, runs through the poem and 
harmonises it and all the twenty years into one happy 
thing. 

The form of the poem is built on one of those pleas- 
ant motives taken from simple things in the far past, the 
charm of which we do not feel at the time, but which, 
having been full of humanity, are enchanting to remem- 
brance. We recall them, and are young again ; the 
years of monotonous struggle glide away, and we love 
what we did, and what we were. And if by chance we 
recollect these events amid the same landscape in which 
they took place, the illusion, and all the emotion that 
attends it, are deepened — for Nature has not changed, 
and we seem for the moment as unchanged as Nature. 
So Lawrence Aylmer felt, seeing the same flowers as of 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 427 

old, hearing the brook make the same music. Again 
Katie tells him her story ; again he sees James wading 
through the meadow ; again he hears old Philip chatter- 
ing in his ear ; again he bids his brother farewell. 
Twenty years have vanished ! How fair, how delightful 
life was long ago ! 

This is a frequent way of Tennyson's ; tales told years 
after the events, and veiled in the dewy glimmer of 
memory. It was so he made The Gardener s Daughter 
and The Miller s Daughter. It was so he sang The 
Grandmother. It was so he made one of the tenderest of 
his smaller poems, revisiting a place where he had 
known his friend, and weaving into his recollection, as 
in The Brook, the voice and the swiftness, the beauty 
and the colour of the waters of the earth. Who does 
not remember In the Valley of Cauteretz, with its rhythm 
that flows with the flowing of the river ? 

All along the valley, stream that flashest white, 

Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night, 

All along the valley, where thy waters flow, 

I walk'd with one I loved two and thirty years ago. 

All along the valley, while I walk'd to-day, 

The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away ; 

For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed, 

Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead, 

And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, 

The voice of the dead was a living voice to me. 

There is yet a word to say about the grace of this 
poem, but I must not forget its portraiture. Here the 
portraits are all woven together by the feeling of the 
man who makes them. Lawrence Aylmer sees them all 



428 Tennyson 



through his own character, and his individual emotion 
secures them into unity. But they could scarcely be 
better done. The young poet, his brother — who thought 
money a dead thing, 

Yet himself could make 
The thing that is not as the thing that is ; 

who had only begun to feel his life, like that time which 
goes before the leaf, 

"When all the wood stands in the mist of green, 
And nothing perfect ; 

whose " primrose fancies " made the rippling song of 
the brook — could not be more briefly or more clearly 
sketched. Then we see Katie Willows, who never ran, 
but moved — 

A little flutter'd, with her eyelids down, 
Fresh apple-blossom, blushing for a boon. 

Straight, but as lissome as a hazel wand ; 
Her eyes a bashful azure, and her hair 
In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell 
Divides threefold to show the fruit within. 

And with them both stands forth the English farmer, 
jf whom Tennyson paints so many types. We hear 
with our very ears old Philip babbling of his stock, his 
dogs, of Sir Arthur's deer that in Darnley Chase 

in copse and fern 
Twinkled the innumerable ear and tail ; 

of his colt and all its pedigree ; of his bargain with the 



I 



Aylmer's Field, Sea Dreams, The Brook 429 

bailiff who in a line or two is flashed into life before us 
as clearly as the farmer. Then one final picture of 
Katie's daughter, coming with a low breath of tender 
air that makes tremble in the hedge 

The fragile bindweed-bells and briony rings, 

fills the frame with youthful freshness and re-creates the 
love-story at the beginning of the tale. All different, 
all excellent, these many portraits adorn and make alive 
this little poem. 

Finally, no poem of this class is more graceful. It 
also is in a new style. I remember nothing like it. 
Only a double-natured man like Tennyson, delicate and 
rugged, could have written it. The farmer is done by 
the farmer in Tennyson ; but when we lay him aside, 
all the rest is as graceful as the scenery. The music of 
the brook is everywhere. The music of pleasant human 
love is also everywhere. The poet-boy fills it with un- 
worldliness. The girl is happy in it, and her youth and 
love make it like a summer day. And even were these 
gracious, pretty, light emotions gone, we could not resist 
the charm of the brook, that, coming from the tarn far 
away amongst the hills, and singing all the way, passes 
by Philip's farm to join the brimming river. We follow 
it, as if we walked with it from its fountains, by streets 
and town and bridge, by field and fallow ; and the gay 
rhythm of the song dances with its chatter and glitters 
with its sun and shade. Nor does it want a momentary 
thought to give it some sympathy with humanity, some 



430 



Tennyson 



remembrance of us who company its waters with our 
fleeting joy and with our steady sorrow — 

For men may come and men may go, 
But I go on for ever. 

For, indeed, with all its sunny grace — there is also a 
little air of human sorrow, which, like a delicate mist, 
faintly sleeps above the poem, and softening its outlines, 
harmonises all. 




I 



CHAPTER XIII 
THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES 

TENNYSON calls his Locks ley Hall, or Sixty Years 
After, a " dramatic monologue," and it is a good 
name to give to a whole series of his poems, the 
" trick " of which I do not quite say he invented, but 
which he wrought into forms so specially his own, that 
they stand apart from work of a similar kind in other 
poets. Browning also made monologues of this kind. 
They, too, had their own qualities and manner, and were 
exceedingly various in metre. Browning's mind was 
filled with so great a crowd of various men and women, 
and of so many different times and countries, that he 
was forced, in order to realise their differences, into 
many different metrical movements. Tennyson, on the 
contrary, not conceiving so many types as Browning, is 
satisfied, on the whole, with one long, six-accented 
metre, with many trisyllables. 

The dramatic monologues of Browning are sometimes 
lyrical, sometimes narrative, sometimes reflective, some- 
times heroic, poetry. The poetic form in which Tennyson 

431 



432 Tennyson 



composed his monologues scarcely varies at all. It is 
an excellent manner for his purpose, and having found it, 
he clung to it. One man or woman speaks, telling a tale 
of the past or of the present. Another person — and 
here the dramatic element enters — is supposed to be 
near at hand, but we only know what he says by the 
speaker repeating a part of what he has heard and reply- 
ing to it ; and we only know of his presence by all that 
is said being addressed to him. The poor woman in 
Rizpah speaks to her visitor ; the Northern Far??ter to 
his servant. 

This is Tennyson's form of the dramatic monologue, 
and it is wrought out with great skill and effectiveness. 
It is an easy form to work in, the easiest of all ; and it is 
characteristic of Tennyson's love of the simple that he 
should choose the easiest. The form being easy to write 
in, the work inevitably tends to become, in inartistic 
hands, slovenly, long-winded, and unforceful. In Tenny- 
son's hands, on the contrary, it is of the most robust, 
careful, concentrated kind. It is extremely rare when 
anything weak intrudes, or when the edge of the mean- 
ing is not quite sharp and clear. Any failure in excel- 
lence is more due to certain elements in the subject, 
chiefly controversial, and which were better excluded, 
than to the work itself. 

It must, however, be remembered that the power of 
writing a good dramatic monologue does not include the 
power of writing a good drama. I doubt very much 
whether even Shakspere could have written a good 



The Dramatic Monologues 433 

dramatic monologue. He could not have kept to the 
single character. The pull in his soul towards the crea- 
tion of more men and women would have been too much 
for him. On the other hand, the creator of a good dra- 
matic monologue is not likely to be a good dramatist. 
Of course, he may have that power, but I remember no 
case of it. The habit of mind by which a poet creates, 
as in a dramatic monologue, one vivid personality out of 
himself is so totally different from the habit of creating 
a number of personalities, all of whom the dramatist con- 
ceives as apart from himself, that it is not probable one 
man will have both habits of mind. Moreover, the 
power of drawing one man in one set of circumstances is 
very different from the power of drawing a number of 
characters clashing together in circumstances which 
are continually changing. The writer of the dramatic 
monologue is likely to keep to his habit if he take to the 
drama, and all his characters will tend to express them- 
selves in monologue. Changing circumstances will not 
modify their speech or their action as much as they 
ought to do. At root, all the characters will be the 
poet ; we shall detect him everywhere ; nor will there be 
enough distinction between the characters to make the 
play interesting, the action dramatic, the personages 
alive enough, or the catastrophe a necessity. This is 
true of all Tennyson's, and, in a lesser degree, of Brown- 
ing's dramas. The Northern Farmer, the Northern 
Cobbler, the second Northern Farmer, the village wife 

in The Entail^ are all keenly alive. But I do not believe 
28 



434 Tennyson 



that Tennyson could have brought these four into a 
drama, and driven them, by their characters hurtling to- 
gether, to a necessary conclusion ; or invented, with 
excellence, the mutual play which should lead to that 
conclusion. In this, the highest of all the creative forms 
of poetry, he would have broken down ; and he always 
did break down when he tried. The fact is that, for 
drama, his own personality was too much with him ; he 
could not get rid of it. But the great dramatist can 
divest himself of his personality. His personages have 
their own characters, not his. He has lost himself in 
making them. I might even say that his will does not 
order their action ; it is rather the meeting of the various 
characters, under the circumstances, which makes the 
conclusion inevitable. He invents, it is true, the cir- 
cumstances, but his personages do not act as he would 
act ; they follow their separate bents ; independent, as 
it were, of his will. And so apart from him are they, so 
little is he in them as a character, that I can conceive, 
to put it paradoxically, that he might be unaware of 
what they are going to do. The true dramatist sits out- 
side of his characters. 

This is the highest kind of creation. Such a creator 
is the true Prometheus. He makes men and women 
who are not himself. But this is not the kind of 
work Tennyson or Browning could do. We hear the 
individuality of their maker in all the personages of 
their dramas say. We see the aims of their maker, his 
tricks of mental attitude, his theories of life, in all they 



The Dramatic Monologues 435 

do. The untrue dramatist sits inside of all his charac- 
ters. Both Browning and Tennyson ought to have kept 
to dramatic monologue, or to such- a variation of dra- 
matic monologue as Pippa Passes^ which no one can 
call a drama. All the same, it is necessary to say, 
though not here to dwell on, that Browning has 
made a far more successful attempt at drama than 
Tennyson. 

Once more, in a drama the characters speak no more 
when the conclusion arrives. The dramatist therefore 
always looks to the future. He is anxious that his char- 
acters should play together towards a far-off end ; that 
every one of them should minister his own part to the 
end ; that each man's part should illuminate the parts 
of all the others. All his interests look forward. But 
in the dramatic monologue there is no forward look ; 
nothing has to be made for a distant end or fitted to it. 
What has been in the past or what is actually doing in 
the present is described, and to write of the past or the 
present is, of course, much easier than to compose a 
changing succession of events and varying emotions 
towards a close in the future. It needs twice the genius 
to write a good drama that it takes to write a good 
dramatic monologue ; but, unfortunately, those who 
have so much of the dramatic instinct as to be able to 
write a dramatic monologue persuade themselves with 
great rapidity that they can write a drama. It thor- 
oughly disturbs me when I think what a series of little 
masterpieces of dramatic monologue we might have had 



436 Tennyson 



if Tennyson had not spent so many years in writing 
dramas. 

The " dramatic monologues," a few examples of which 
I select — since it is not possible to write of them all — 
belong directly to the tragedy and to the comedy of life. 
Rizpah^ Despair^ The First Quarrel^ are examples of the 
first. All the dialect poems are examples of the second. 
There is another class which can scarcely be called 
tragedy or comedy, the speaker in which reviews the 
whole of his life, or one event in it, and with a certain 
social or ethical direction. Of these, Locksley Hall, or 
Sixty Years After, is one example, and The Wreck is 
another. Each of them also reveals and explains a 
typical character, but the individual is not lost in the 
generalisation. Tennyson's speakers are specialised 
enough to separate them from other persons of the same 
kind. The Northern Farmer, though he represents a 
class, is his own delightful self. When he died, he left 
no one behind who was exactly he, though he left a 
number of men who were like him. The general lines 
of the Northern Cobbler's position are the same as those 
of many reformed drinkers, but no one but himself 
could have set up the bottle in the window, or declared 
that he would take it with him after death, like a Norse 
warrior his sword, before the throne. We possess the 
type in these poems of Tennyson, but we have also the 
individual. 

It would be wrong also not to speak of the variety 
and range of the characters represented. We pass from 



The Dramatic Monologues 437 

the aged squire, whose youth was full of fire and whose 
age is full of the ashes of that fire, to the woman who 
has forsaken husband and child and found a love which 
satisfied her soul, but whose love and life are wrecked. 
We stand on the sea-shore with the working man who 
has been driven by misery and false creeds into suicide, 
and sit by the bedside of the mother whose son was 
hanged, and whose awful love gathered and buried his 
bones. The seaman's wife, the bandit's bride, the Irish 
girl, the hospital nurse, the ruined girl and her merciful 
rival, the farmer, the cobbler, the sick child, the village 
gossip, are all created. Almost every class of society is 
laid under contribution in stories which range from the 
black tragedy of Rizpah to the light comedy of The 
Spinster's Sweet-arts. 

The first of these I choose is Locksley Hall, or Sixty 
Years After, and I connect it with the Locksley Hall 
which appeared in 1842. That poem stirred the whole 
of England into a new sensation. We can scarcely call 
it a " dramatic monologue," but it held this form of 
poetry within it, and went to its verge. We might even 
say that a dramatic movement is played in the hero's 
soul, in which three or four aspects of his nature take 
personality one after another, the lover, the betrayed 
lover, the curser of his time, the man who reacts with 
anger from his disillusion and his cursing, and the one 
man who is looking back on all the phases through 
which he has passed. In whatever aspect we see him, 
he is the young man. Youth flames throughout the 



438 Tennyson 



poem ; youth wandering on the shore, clinging to the 
present, dipping into the future, while he 

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would 
be; 

youth breaking with the spring into love and into lovely 
imagining of love ; youth raging at his sweetheart's 
falseness, at her husband, at society ; youth remember- 
ing its " wild pulsation " before it entered into life ; 
youth exaggerating its sorrow, yearning to burst away 
from convention ; youth ashamed of its bluster, and 
emerging from it into resolution ; youth flinging love to 
the winds and taking to science ; youth bidding good- 
bye to the past, and devoting it to desolation and to 
tempest in a new rush of wrath ; and finally going 
fiercely into the sea of manhood — with the roaring wind. 
For so it ends : 

Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall ! 
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree 
fall. 

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and 

holt, 
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunder-bolt. 

Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow ; 
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go. 

Was there ever anything more youthful ? It touched 
everything that was young in England and gave it voice. 
The very scenery is full of the things which charm the 
young — the stars, the copses ringing with the birds, the 



i 



The Dramatic Monologues 439 

colours deepening on their breast in spring ; the curlew's 
cry ; the stately ships going by on the sea ; the roaring 
cataracts of the ocean ridges thundering on the sands ; 
the vision of the tropics. Take the stars — a new, clear 
voice, unheard before, echoes in these lines — 

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, 
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. 

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade, 
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. 

And yet, with all this efflorescence of youth, which in 
its very exaggeration makes the central excellence of 
the poem, a curious steadiness of thought and a restrained 
force of wording, such as belong to established man- 
hood, pervade it also. There are many lines which have 
become household words, which, while young in their 
expression, have also the fulness of maturity, — and to 
write these and to know that one had written them along 
with all the youthful verse, must have given Tennyson 
the supreme consciousness that he was a poet who had a 
whole world before him ; and he told England this in a 
single line — 

Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would 
yield. 

Sixty years pass by, and the young man is old, and 
Tennyson tells in a true dramatic monologue what the 
youth has become. It is a marvellous study to be writ- 
ten by a man over eighty years of age. He had now- 
come to such years as " the many-wintered crow that 



440 Tennyson 



leads the clanging rookery home " ; but the poetic force 
in this poem has a constant volume. The rhythm is as 
fine as in the days long past. Here is one example — 

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles, 
Universal Ocean softly washing all her warless Isles. 

The poem is somewhat too long, but even that may have 
been the poet's intention. He had to represent age, and 
age is garrulous. And the image of old age is as clear 
and true in this Locksley Hall as the image of youth is 
in its predecessor. We might work out from the poem 
all the characteristics of an old man — from babbling 
anger to soft forgiveness, from many-passioned memory 
to pathetic expectation of the world to come. All is 
age, and an age which, even in its petulance and preju- 
dice, is to be loved and honoured. The more I read the 
poem, the more I think it worthy of respect as a work 
of art. 

Many, like myself, will dislike its views about man 
and the future of man. They are the views of a half- 
pessimist tempered by belief in immortality. But no 
one has at all the right to say that they are the views of 
Tennyson. He had created a certain type of character 
in the young man of the poem of 1842, and though he 
himself enters into this young man, it is only when he 
is expressing the general joy and impulsiveness of youth. 
The real representative of Tennyson in 1842 is the Ulys- 
ses^ and Ulysses is wholly different from the old or the 
young man in both the Locksley Halls, Tennyson shows 



The Dramatic Monologues 441 

in the later poem into what the special character of the 
hero of the earlier poem was likely to grow after sixty 
years had fled away. It would not be just to affirm that 
he is painting himself, as some have said ; the subject 
infers that he is creating another man. 

The young man took to science to relieve his mind 
of love's illusion. It was no wonder then that, given 
his temperament, he found himself in a sea of disap- 
pointment. He has not taken to work for man save on 
his estate ; he has isolated himself with a wife p,nd in his 
country-house, and he has continued to brood over the 
ills of the world at a distance from them. He remains 
as much locked up in himself as he was before. Had 
he had more sympathy with the movement of the world, 
he might have seen some good, even in the revolu- 
tionists and the jabberers. He himself, exactly as in 
his youth, does not refrain from noise as loud as that 
made by those whom he denounces. He cries, like 
Carlyle, against mere speech, and sins, like Carlyle, by 
an overflow of language ; sickening at the lawless din, 
unaware that his own din is even more lawless, and 
overwhelming his grandson with " Chaos, Cosmos ! Cos- 
mos, Chaos," and with all the wailing and screaming of 
the pessimists — a noise a thousandfold worse for man- 
kind, or for a man to make, than the noise of all the 
mob-orators of the world. It is precisely what the young 
fellow of the first Locksley Hall would grow into, if he 
lived apart from men and kept an edge of poetry in 
him — enough to make him shudder at all the evil of 



442 Tennyson 



which he hears, but not enough to drive him into ac- 
tual contention with it. This is tempered, as I said, 
by belief in immortality, and in evolution. The im- 
mortality will set the poor wretches of this cruel universe 
right in the world to come, but it holds out no present 
hope for this world. And evolution ? Evolution has 
moved us into higher life with such an infinite slowness 
in the past that we can only expect a better world on 
earth, if we can dare to expect it at all, when geon after 
3eon has passed away. At last, out of this crying of 
despair, mingled with the pathetic forgiveness and the 
pathetic memories of personal life, arises a hidden hope, 
at which, if he had wrought, he would not have come to 
so sorrowful an age — " Love will conquer at the last," 
and the poem ends with an excellent morality. But the 
man, we feel, v/ill yet need to reverse himself in the 
world to come. It is a masterly study — a wonderful 
thing for Tennyson to have written at an age when most 
men are somewhat too inactive in mind to be able to 
pass out of themselves, and for a time to enter into the 
soul of another. 

The final question one asks about it is : Was it worth 
doing at all ? Was it worth a poet's while to flood the 
world with all this wailing music, to depress mankind 
who is depressed enough, to picture so much ill and so 
little good, to fall into a commonplace realism, to seem 
to make the querulous hopelessness of the character he 
draws the measure of the future of mankind ? It was not 
worth a poet's while ; and I wish, in spite of the excel- 



The Dramatic Monologues 443 

lence of the work, that he had not taken the subject 
at all. 

The next of these dramatic monologues I select as an 
example is The Northern Farmer. It is a vivid piece 
out of the great comedy of man, not of its mere mirth, 
but of that elemental humorousness of things which 
belongs to the lives of the brutes as well as to ourselves, 
that steady quaintness of the ancient earth and all who 
are born of her, which first made men smile, and which 
has enabled us to bear our pain better, and to love one 
another more, than might appear possible in a world 
where Nature generally seems to be doing her best to 
hurt us first, and then to kill us. This kind of elemental 
humour rarely emerges in the educated classes, except 
when we have scraped off all their conventions and got 
down to the rough grain of humanity, but is continually 
met in the peasant and farmer class ; and, curiously 
enough, it was the only kind of true humour that Ten- 
nyson possessed. There was always in him, behind his 
delicate grace and educated charm, a piece of rugged, 
wild, uncultured human nature, such as might belong to 
a peasant — a portion of man just as he emerged from 
being a part of wild Nature — which often gave an extra- 
ordinary depth and force to the lovelier parts of his 
poetry, but which also enabled him to write these dialect 
poems in a way no other poet has approached. 

The Northei-n Farmer is the finest of them all. There 
never was a more superbly hewn piece of rough and 
vital sculpture. What Michael Angelo did for the 



444 Tennyson 



Prophet Amos into whose writings entered the herds- 
man, Tennyson has done for this farmer, with a chisel 
as vivid and as bold. He is the very genius of ancient 
agriculture, and seems born out of the fruitful bosom of 
Mother Earth. He breathes and smells of the earth, 
and the earth speaks by his voice. When he tells how 
he stubbed Thurnaby waste and rumbled out of it the 
boggle and the stones together, and made grass of the 
bracken and whin, it is the lover of the Earth who tells 
us how she desires to be handled. When he says that 
God Almighty scarcely knows what He is doing when 
He takes him away, it is the rude Teuton tiller of the 
land who speaks, who ploughed the land with one hand 
and fought the Roman with the other, and who wor- 
shipped Thor, the farmer's friend. His first duty is to 
the land and then to the squire who owns it, and, that 
done, what has he to do with parsons ? God Almighty 
knows that he has done, and none better, what he ought 
to do. He belongs to the ancient nobility of the plough 
and the spade, and he sickens to think of that base-born 
plutocrat, machinery, putting his nose into the blessed 
fields. What has been, ought to be for ever, and what 
has been is as old as the world. Men ought to cling to 
the ancient courses. Every night for forty year he 's 
had his ale, and he will have it now, though he die. 
This is a primaeval creature, and he is drawn, as a 
giant, who happened to be a poet, might have drawn 
him before the Flood. It is a mighty piece of work. 
I pass over the others, and take the Rizpah. This 



The Dramatic Monologues 445 

brings us into noble tragedy — noble, not by its story 
which is not of heroes, but noble by two things : by its 
dreadful pathos and by its infinite motherhood. 

Flesh of my flesh was gone, but bone of my bone was left — 
I stole them all from the lawyers — and you, — will you call it 

a theft ?— 
My baby, the bones that had suck'd me, the bones that had 

laughed and cried — 
Theirs ? O no ! They are mine — not theirs — they had moved 

in my side. 

This is a cry out of the heart of all the mothers of the 
world of man from the beginning, nay, the cry of all the 
mother-beasts and birds before man was known on 
earth. All the tragedy of motherhood which has loved 
and lost is pressed into that verse, maddens and wails 
and loves through the whole poem. To find anything 
like the dark horror and untamable woe of Rizpah^ we 
must go back to the wild Elizabethan dramatists, and to 
one higher than they. When I read the lines of Tenny- 
son which bring together the passion of bereaved 
motherhood and the thin wailing of her boy's voice on 
the wind, the raging of the storm and the naked gibbet 
shrieking in the night, I think of Lear in the storm, 
when the coming madness of the old king, and the imi- 
tative madness of Edgar, and the elemental folly of the 
fool raised into a wildness of nature by the madness of 
the rest, are all matched and heightened by the roaring 
and flashing of the tempest over the barren moor. 

Wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea — 

And Willy's voice in the wind, '* O mother, come out to me," 



446 Tennyson 



Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot 

go? 
For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares at 

the snow. 

We should be seen, my dear ; they would spy us out of the 

town. 
The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the 

down, 
When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of 

the chain. 
And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched 

with the rain. 

This is the tragedy of Nature wedded to the tragedy 
of a mother. Her only son is hanged in chains and 
eaten by the ravens. The horror and the shame, like 
ravens, eat her heart. Hung on the coast, so high 

That all the ships of the world could stare at him, passing by. 

And the dreadful shame, struck into that splendid line, 
and her unspeakable misery of love drove her to mad- 
ness. But when she was let out from her cell " stupid 
and still," her mother's love was always sane ; and as 
the bones fell, she " gathered her baby together " : 

Do you think I was scared by the bones ? I kiss'd 'em, I buried 

'em all — 
I can't dig deep, I am old — in the night by the church-yard 

wall, 
My Willy '11 rise up whole when the trumpet of judgment 'ill 

sound. 
But I charge you never to say that I laid him in holy ground. 

And now she is come to die, and the " Lord who has 
been with her in the dark " will make her happy with 



The Dramatic Monologues 447 

her son — and a vast cry, the cry of her son's love, comes 
to her, shaking the walls, out of eternity : 

But I cannot hear what you say for my Willy's voice in the 

wind — 
The snow and the sky so bright — he used but to call in the 

dark, 
And he calls to me now from the church and not from the gibbet 

— for hark ! 
Nay — you can hear it yourself — it is coming — shaking the 

walls — 
Willy — the moon 's in a cloud Good-night. I am going. 

He calls. 

It was but a common hanging ; a common thief, and 
an old wife mad with grief, an every-day thing ! But a 
great poet came by, and we have this — the depths of 
sorrow, the depths of love, infinite pity, infinite mother- 
hood, a world on a world. 




CHAPTER XIV 
SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY 

THE later poems of Tennyson are full of speculative 
theology, and of an interesting kind ; that kind 
which not only reveals character, but also opens out 
those more uncommon regions of the mind where life and 
character combining have produced strange gardens of 
thought. The poet does not move here in the moral 
world, or as the emotional imager of life, or as the builder 
of tales by the harp of imagination ; but in the world 
beyond the senses, where things are felt and thought, not 
seen and proved ; in the great deeps of passionate con- 
jecture. And what he thinks there, and how he feels in 
that spaceless and timeless country, unveil to us some of 
the secret places of his character. 

I have used the word " passionate" above, because, 
unless such speculations are warmed I fire from the 
heart, they are not fit subjects for poetry. Tennyson's 
speculative subjects — suqh as. Where was the soul before 
its birth ? — take their rise always from the cries of love 

within him for satisfaction, and, since they come from 

448 



speculative Theology 449 

that source, their treatment by him is always poetical. I 
have also used the word " conjecture " above, in order 
to distinguish these subjects from others which he did 
not regard as matters of speculation, but of faith. Ten- 
nyson believed in God and that God cared for men ; and 
he naturally wrote with glowing warmth about One in 
whom he thus believed, I might quote many passages to 
prove this, but I quote only one. It is his great hymn, 
a solemn anthem rather, into which he drew all the 
thoughts and their attendant emotions which during his 
life and in his poems he had conceived, felt, and ex- 
pressed concerning the Father of men : 

I. 

Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 

Infinite Ideality ! 

Immeasurable Reality ! 

Infinite Personality ! 
Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 

II. 

We feel we are nothing — for all is Thou and in Thee ; 
We feel we are something — that also has come from Thee ; 
We feel we are nothing — but Thou wilt help us to be. 
Hallowed be Thy name — Halleluiah ! 

This, then, is not matter of speculation to Tennyson ; 
but, in what sp ,ial ways, independent of an outward 
revelation, this mighty Spirit communicated Himself to 
the individual soul ; and how He was connected with 
the universe of Nature — these were matters of conjec- 
ture, and the poet made many speculations concerning 
29 



450 Tennyson 



them. Then again, immortality (that is the continuous 
consciousness of one's own personality after death) was a 
matter of faith to Tennyson! It was fully set forth in 
In Memoriam. It became troubled after that poem, as I 
have said ; but his faith in it fought like a hero against 
armies of doubt. It finally settled down into absolute con- 
viction. But, in what way we were immortal ; whether 
we were instantly alive and active after dissolution or 
slept for a time ; whether we were still in connection 
with those we loved on earth ; whether we moved onward 
in that new world as slowly as on earth ; what our rela- 
tion to the universe was after death ; whether we re- 
turned in a new life to earth, losing memory but retaining 
our essential personality ; whether we existed before we 
were born into this world, and if so, of what kind was 
that existence ; — these and many others were matters of 
speculation. 

The first of these is his conjecture with regard to the 
origin of the soul, that is, according to him, that essential 
part of infinite Being which, joined to the infant, be- 
comes personal on earth. He assumes its existence ; 
and he held, as a speculation, that it was in God before 
it took form on earth. Whether he adopted the further 
view that it was conscious then of a separate life, I can- 
not make out with any clearness from his poems. Some- 
times it seems as if he did think this, but chiefly not. 
The soul was a part of God's life, but in that general life 
it had no self-consciousness. When a man was to be 
born, a part, a spark of the divine essence, was taken 



Speculative Theology 451 

forth, as it were, out of the vast Deep of Spirit, and for 
the time of life on earth was enfolded in that which we 
call matter, with all its relative limitations, in order that 
this piece of immortal essence, the soul, might develop 
and realise a separate personality, understanding that he 
was himself, and always to be himself : 

Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside. 

The new being learnt slowly the Me and the Not-me, 
learnt his personal apartness. The baby does not think 
that this is I : 

But as he grows he gathers much, 

And learns the use of " I " and " Me" ; 
And finds, " I am not what I see, 

And other than the things I touch." 

So rounds he to a separate mind 

From whence clear memory may begin, 
As thro' the frame that binds him in 

His isolation grows defined. 

The *' use of blood and breath " is to outline person- 
ality. When the man dies, he has secured for ever a 
distinct being. The other faith — That we shall remerge 
ourselves in the general soul, is faith, he says, as vague 
as it is unsweet. The soul comes, then, out of the vast 
Deep of God and returns to it again.* It comes im- 

* In The Two Voices, a poem of 1833, this speculation of pre- 
existence has already occupied his mind. The dark vague voice 
suggests that beginning implies ending. How do I know, the other 
voice within answers, that the first time I was, I was human, or that 



452 Tennyson 



personal ; it returns to it a personality. This is his view. 
It is a common view, but in a great poet's hands it is 
expressed so imaginatively that it ceases to be common. 
In the epilogue to In Memoriam^ when he is thinking 
about the child who will be born of the marriage he 
then celebrates in song, he says : 

A soul shall draw from out the vast, 
And strike his being into bounds. 

In the Idylls of the King^ Arthur is born, according 
to the body, of Uther and Ygerne, but the coming of the 
soul into him (and this is made more forcible by the 
allegory which makes Arthur symbolise the rational soul) 
is mystically represented by the babe who descends from 
heaven with the divine ship into the sea, and is washed 
to Merlin's feet by the wave. The two wizards, stand- 
ing in Tintagil Cove, 

Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps 

It seem'd in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof 

A dragon wing'd, and all from stem to stern 

my life now is in truth my beginning? Life cycles round, and I 
may have been in another world before I came here, though I remem- 
ber nothing of it. I may have been in a nobler place, or in lower 
lives, and have forgotten all I was. Or I may have floated free as 
naked essence (and to this theory Tennyson finally clung), and then 
of course I should remember nothing of it. Whatever I may have 
been, there is something 

That touches me with mystic gleams, 
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams — 
Of something felt, like something here ; 
Of something done, I know not where ; 
Such as no language may declare. 



Speculative Theology 453 

Bright with a shining people on the decks, 
And gone as soon as seen. 

A noble piece of symbolism ! When Merlin afterwards 
is asked about 

The shining dragon and the naked child, 
Descending in the glory of the seas, 

he answers, laughing, in riddling triplets, the last lines of 
which are these — lines quoted again and again at every 
crisis of Arthur's life, and at his death : 

Sun, rain, and sun ! and 7vhere is he that knows ? 
From the great deep to the great deep he goes. 

We know what Tennyson in this passage meant by the 
Great Deep from his poem De Frofundts, written on 
the birth of his eldest son, and far the finest of his 
speculative poems. Its stately and mystic sublimity is 
warmed by the profound emotion of his fatherhood. 
It is divided into two parts — two greetings. Here is 
the beginning of it — and since Milton no more dignified 
lines have been written : 

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 

Where all that was to be, in all that was, 

Whirl'd for a million aeons thro' the vast 

Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light — 

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep. 

Thro' all this changing world of changeless law, 

And every phase of ever-heightening life. 

And nine long months of antenatal gloom. 

With this last moon, this crescent — her dark orb 

Touch'd with earth's light — thou comest, darling boy : 

and then he prophesies the boy's life and the man's, till 



454 Tennyson 



he join the great deep again. The second greeting 
speaks first of the great deep itself. 

Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
From that great deep, before our world begins, 
Whereon the Spirit of God moves as He will — 
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep. 
From that true world within the world we see,* 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore — 
Out of the deep. Spirit, out of the deep. 
With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun 
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy. 

And the Spirit is half-lost in its body which is its shadow, 
and yet is the sign and the cause of its becoming per- 
sonal. It wails on entering the world, for it is banished ; 
it knows mystery and doubt and pain and time and 
space, in its progress to self-consciousness. Yet that 
it might become a person was the intention of the In- 
finite One who sent it out of Himself — 

Who made thee unconceivably Thyself 
Out of His whole World-self and all in all. 

And the chief miracle is this, that the child grows 
into a separate will and character, knowing himself to 

* Of this great deep of Spirit, knowledge but stirs the surface- 
shadow. It does not pierce into its depths : 

The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth, 
And in the million-millionth of a grain 
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore. 
And ever vanishing, never vanishes. 
Tome, my son, more mystic than myself. 
Or even than the Nameless is to me. 

The Ancient Sage, 



Speculative Theology 455 

be himself, and known by others to be himself — for ever 
different from all other souls — 

With power on thine own act and on the world. 

This is the main speculation. Within it arose two 
other questions which have always pervaded inquiry 
concerning the origin of the soul. The first is — Does 
the soul live over and over again in other forms on this 
earth, and, not carrying with it full memory of the past 
lives, yet carry with it the progress it has gained, or the 
retrogression it has made ? There are tvvo lines in this 
De Profundis which seem to suggest that this was a 
thought of Tennyson's : 

and still depart 
From death to death thro' life and life, and find 
Nearer and ever nearer Him. 

And it was certainly his view that the spirit moved 
onwards hereafter : 

From state to state the spirit walks. 

But this does not say that the spirit returns to earth in 
another form. On the contrary, many passages appear 
to assert that personality, established here, moves on- 
ward, self-conscious, and with full memory, in the 
world to come, returning no more to earth. Tennyson 
did not, then, hold the Oriental or the Platonic view, 
which has been modified by a thousand speculators 
into a thousand forms. 

The second question is — Has the soul, while shad- 



45^ Tennyson 



owed and limited by sense, vague remembrances, as 
Plato or Wordsworth thought, of the diviner land 
whence it came, touches of what it was of old in God 
— at which touches the sensible world fades away, and 
man, suddenly swept into the supersensuous life, knows 
again his being in the Being of the infinite Spirit ? The 
quotation already given from The Two Voices proves 
that Tennyson did suggest this in his youth, but in the 
later poems it was plainly stated. As age grew upon 
him, this speculation became more dear ; and the pas- 
sage in The Ancient Sage which best enshrines it is full 
of a personal interest. It records Tennyson's youthful 
experience, and looking back on this from his old age, 
he explains what he believes the experience meant. 

The young man who is with the ancient Sage repre- 
sents unbelief in any life beyond the material, and his 
song cries out concerning man : 

O worms and maggots of to-day 

Without their hope of wings ! 
Tho' some have gleams or so they say 

Of more than mortal things. 

And the Sage answers, '* To-day ? " Worms of the 
present perhaps, for indeed a man may make himself 
a very maggot, — " but what of yesterday ? " Has a 
man no remembrance, no vague suggestion of a past in 
which he had life before he was on earth ? And here 
we have Tennyson's own experience : 

For oft 
On me, when boy, there came what then I call'd, 



Speculative Theology 457 

Who knew no books and no philosophies, 

In my boy-phrase, " The Passion of the Past." 

The first gray streak of earliest summer dawn, 

The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom. 

As if the late and early were but one — 

A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower 

Had murmurs, ' ' Lost and gone and lost and gone ! " 

A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell — 

Desolate sweetness — far and far away — 

What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy ? 

I know not, and I speak of what has been. 

This common feeling, this mystic suggestion of the 
dreaming soul, has never been more beautifully given. 

Some divine farewell, 
Desolate sweetness, far and far away, 

is perfect in truth and pathos. The same thought is 
put, almost as beautifully, in a song published four 
years after The Ancient Sage, and the motive of it is 
taken from the lingering sweetness of the words — " far 
and far away " — upon his ear. Here also Tennyson 
recalls the boy's celestial dreams of a land known in 
the dawn of life. I should like to quote it all, but I 
select only the three verses which bear on the question : 

What vague world-whisper, mystic pain or joy. 
Thro' those three words would haunt him when a boy. 

Far — far — away ? 

A whisper from his dawn of life ? a breath 
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death 

Far — far — away. 

Far, far, how far ? from o'er the gates of Birth, 
The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth, 

Far — far — away ? 



458 Tennyson 



This, felt as a boy, brings about, in such a tempera- 
ment, and when it recurs in a different way in manhood, 
the apparent dissolution of all the world of sense, un- 
consciousness of the body and existence apart from it. 
We have heard of this already in the Sir Galahad. 
Transports mightier than love lift him above the world 
of sense. His spirit beats her mortal bars. His very 
body ceases to be matter : 

And, stricken by an angel's hand, 

This mortal armour that I wear, 
This weight and size, this heart and eyes, 

Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air. 

The weird seizures of the Prince in The Princess, in 
which he knew not the shadow from the substance ; the 
visions of Arthur, in which the earth seems not earth, 
the light and air not light and air, his very hand and 
foot a dream, lead us up to Tennyson's full and personal 
expression of this experience in The Ancient Sage : 

And more, my son ! for more than once when I 

Sat all alone, revolving in myself 

The word that is the symbol of myself, 

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 

And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 

Melts into heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs 

Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, 

But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self 

The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 

Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words. 

Themselves but shadows of a shadow- world. 

It is the vision, vouchsafed to earth, of what the soul 



Speculative Theology 459 

will be when it returns out of the shadow of sense into 
the substance whence it came : 

If what we call 
The Spirit flash not all at once from out 
This shadow into substance. 

" This world," said Novalis, " is not a dream, but it 
ought to become one, and perhaps it will." And the 
misery, hardness, and folly of earth are, Tennyson thinks, 
in the dream, and not in the reality. We misshape 
through the senses the actual world. " My God," he 
cries in The Sisters^ speaking in the mouth of their 
father, '' I would not live. 

Save that I think this gross hard-seeming world 

Is our misshaping vision of the Powers 

Behind the world, that make our griefs our gains." 

Death then is the flashing of the soul, out of a life in 
which all reality is distorted, into the luminous straight 
life out of which it came ; the passing from illusion into 
reality. 

Yet another speculation is connected with this theory 
of the soul, and concerns its power of acting indepen- 
dently of the body. This speculation asks three ques- 
tions. First, can the soul of one living in the other 
world speak to the soul of one living on earth, not by 
voice, but by intensity of thought, driven by intensity 
of feeling, smiting through space on the thought and 
feeling of a soul on earth? Secondly, can those on 
earth communicate in this way with those that have 
passed away ? Thirdly, can two persons both on earth 



460 Tennyson 



touch one another in this fashion — one soul vibrating, as 
if through the ether, its message to another soul — across 
any distance whatever ? To all these three questions 
Tennyson answers yes. In Meinoriam is full of passages 
which either maintain or suggest the two first. " The 
dead shall look me through and through," he cries. 
" If the grave divide us not, be with me now ! " 

And he, the Spirit himself, may come 
When all the nerve of sense is dumb 
Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost. 

The soul of his friend in heaven answers his cry for 
love, 

I watch thee from the quiet shore ; 

Thy spirit up to mine may reach ; 

But in dear words of human speech 
We two communicate no more. 

And most of all this is laid down in that full-versed 
passage, when, rapt by reading the letters of his friend 
from all the world of sense, the two souls meet, and he 
is swept into the infinite world : 

Till all at once it seem'd at last 
The living soul was flash'd on mine,* 

* This is a casual experience on earth, but it will be the normal 
experience of souls in the world to come. There is a verse in the 
poem entitled, Happy, which expresses this : 

This wall of solid flesh that comes between your soul and mine 
Will vanish and give place to the beauty that endures, 

The beauty that endures on the Spiritual height, 
When we shall stand transfigured, like Christ on Hermon hill 

And moving each to music, soul in soul and light in light. 
Shall flash thro' one another in a moment as we will. 



Speculative Theology 461 

And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd 
About empyreal heights of thought 
And came on that which is, and caught 

The deep pulsations of the world. 

Many other instances occur in the poems. The 
mother in Rizpah hears her son's voice on the wind, 
calling to her. In the hour of her death he calls so 
loud that she dies in bliss after her awful sorrow. In 
The Ring^ the dead mother makes her child conscious 
of her presence ; the child sees her face ; and the hus- 
band feels his dead wife impress her will upon him — 

The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man, 
But cannot wholly free itself from Man, 
Are calling to each other thro' a dawn 
Stranger than earth has ever seen ; the veil 
Is rending, and the Voices of the day 
Are heard across the Voices of the dark. 

In The Sisters^ the mystic bond which unites them is 
not dissolved by death. The love and sorrow of the 
dead overwhelm the life of the living sister ; and the 
man who loved them both feels them, from the far 
world, moving always with him. It is the one lovely 
passage of a poem which is not a great success. 

Now in this quiet of declining life 
Thro' dreams by night and trances of the day. 
The sisters glide about me hand in hand, 
Both beautiful alike, nor can I tell 
One from the other, no, nor care to tell 
One from the other, only know they come. 
They smile upon me, till, remembering all 
The love they both have borne me, and the love 



462 Tennyson 



I bore them both — divided as I am 
From either by the stilhiess of the grave — 
I know not which of these I love the most. 

The third question asks whether two souls while still 
on earth may not, in high-wrought states of intense 
feeling, also touch each other, sometimes clearly, some- 
times obscurely. Tennyson thought it possible. In 
Enoch A^'defi, when Philip asks Annie to marry him, she 
answers that it is borne in on her that Enoch lives. 
When she was wed, a footstep seemed to fall on her 
path, whispers on her ear ; she could not bear to be 
alone, she thought when she lifted the latch to enter her 
house, she might see Enoch by the fire — and these mys- 
terious instincts only passed away when she had a child 
by Philip, They were the passionate thoughts of Enoch 
from his far-off isle striking on her heart. And on the 
day of her marriage, Enoch himself heard 

Though faintly, merrily, far and far away, 

the pealing of his parish bells, and started up, shudder- 
ing, for then the tragedy of his life was wrought. In 
fuller statement, Aylmers Field records this belief of 
Tennyson's. When Edith dies, calling on her lover's 
name, he hears the cry in London and knows that she is 
gone: 

Star to star vibrates light ; may soul to soul 
Strike thro' a finer element of her own ? 

So speaks the poet, marking the very question which the 
scientific men in the Psychical Society ask themselves. 



Speculative Theology 463 

Are these touches done through the finer forms of matter, 
or is that matter spirit ? 

These were some of Tennyson's speculations con- 
cerning the soul. But they all assumed the existence 
of a great Spirit, and of our souls as a part of him. 
As Tennyson grew old, these assumptions were more 
and more challenged from the side of philosophy and 
science, and the world in which he lived grew more 
and more careless of belief in them. One result of 
this was an assertion of materialism in which God and 
the soul were alike denied. He met the materialism in a 
Drama, The F7'0?mse of May ^ for which I have no admira- 
tion. It seems to make the altogether false assumption 
that materialism necessarily ends in immorality. 

He is more interesting, and says nearly all he wants 
to say, in the poem of The Ancient Sage — a later Two 
Voices — which contains a great number of speculative 
answers to the assertions of materialism. Their specu- 
lative character induces me to call attention to a few 
of them in this chapter. 

The young man who walks with the Sage declares 
that there is nothing but what the senses tell us. God 
has never been seen. 

" In yourself," the Sage replies, " the Nameless speaks, 
and you see Him when you send your soul through the 
boundless heaven." This is Kant's famous phrase put 
into verse. " If the Spirit," he adds, " should withdraw 
from all you see, and hear, the whole world of sense 
would vanish." 



464 Tennyson 



" Since God never came among us, He cannot be 
proved." 

" No," answers the Sage, " nothing can be proved. 
You cannot prove the existence of the world, or of the 
body or the soul, or of yourself, or of me that speak 
with you — nor can you disprove these things. There- 
fore, since you can neither affirm nor deny by reason, 
cleave to the sunnier side of faith in a Power who makes 
the summer out of the winter ! " 

" What Power ? The real power is Time, that brings 
all things to decay." 

" There is no such thing as Time. It is relative, not 
absolute. You cannot argue from its effects. They 
exist to us, but not to God ; and the earth- life and its 
perishing precede the true life ; their darkness is in us, 
not in reality. It is like the yolk in the egg which 
breaks out into a new being." 

" Ah ! " sings the young man, " we are each but as 
one ripple in a boundless deep. Live, then, only to 
enjoy, and forget the darkness to which we hasten." 

"Yes, but the ripple feels the boundlessness of the 
deep, and feels itself as at one with its boundless motion. 
It knows itself alive, and knows that there is a chance, 
even in the judgment of the understanding, that utter 
darkness does not close the day. The clouds you see 
are themselves children of the sun. The light and 
shadow that you say rule below are mere names. Both 
are only relative. The Absolute is beyond them both. 
And, at least, the conclusion to be drawn from our 



Speculative Theology 465 

gloom is different from yours — ' Eat and drink, for to- 
morrow we die.' Day and night are only counter-terms 
like border races always at war. You may talk for ever 
in battle about them. One thing, at the end of all 
speculation, is plain. There is night enough in your 
city which you can make into light. Do it, and then, 
before you die, you may see 

The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day 
Strike on the Mount of Vision." 

Thus the Sage ends his speculations, and we see, in 
this last advice, the practical moralist emerging from 
the metaphysical poet who thinks that Time and Space 
do not really exist ; that our life here is illusion in com- 
parison with the true life which underlies the illusive ; 
and that the world of matter in which we move is only 
what we, in a distorted fashion, perceive of Spirit. 

The poem is interesting to compare with The Two 

Voices. It knits together the views of his old age and 

of his youth, the thoughts of 1842 with those of 1885. 

But we see in its constant reference to the night and 

decay which beset mankind how strongly the trouble of 

the world and of the individual man had now affected 

him. And he asked himself — If there be a Spirit of 

whom we form a part and who loves us, if our real self 

is the soul, and it comes from God and goes to God ; 

if it is thus necessarily immortal — why are we in such 

trouble ? The speculative answer he gives arose out of 

his reading of Darwin. It is — That our body comes 
30 



466 Tennyson 



from the brute, and carries the brute with it ; that in 
the body, the soul met with the brute, and had to con- 
quer the brute. In that admixture, the worry and the 
battle, the confusion and torment of it all, were con- 
tained. This battle, repeated in every individual, is 
repeated also in the whole race. It ended quickly 
enough for the individual, for he was transferred to a 
higher world, beyond the brutal elements ; but it was to 
reach an end for the wdiole race with as infinite a slow- 
ness as it had been conducted in the past, ^on after 
aeon was to pass, before man, as a whole, would reach 
his perfection. I think that this latter view, of which I 
have elsewhere spoken, was a pity ; but how is a poet 
to avoid trouble in his art when he allows himself to be 
influenced by scientific theories ? He is sure to disturb 
the clearness of his fountain. He ought to keep out of 
science altogether. 

As to the individual, it was different. Why did God 
link a piece of divine being to a brutal matter ? What 
could be the use of it ? In I71 Memoriam^ in many 
poems before and after it, the problem is stated and 
speculations are made upon it. It was partly done, as 
we have already seen, that the soul might realise its per- 
sonality, might, having lived in the body, learn that it 
had distinct being ; and indeed, so far as we know, 
there is no other way of learning it. But there was 
something more. This was done, in order that the soul 
might conquer the brute, and having conquered, might 
know that it could live for ever on a higher plane. 



speculative Theology 467 

When the beast was worked out, then the soul knew it- 
self to be of God, and from God, and belonging to God 
for ever. This is put most clearly in that poem entitled, 
By an Evolutionist^ where we find Tennyson, at the age 
of eighty years, telling us not only what he thought, but 
also to what he had attained. Its personal record is of 
a profound interest. We hear one of our greatest men, 
in whom imagination burned to the close of life, reveal- 
ing what he believed God had done for him, and had 
given him power to do. 

If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than their own, 
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice be mute? 

No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, 

Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy Province of the 
brute. 

I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze at a field in the Past, 
Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a low desire, 

But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is quiet at last 

As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height 
that is higher. 

So it was with the poet at the close of his long conten- 
tion ; and when it comes to that, speculation is no more, 
and certainty is hard at hand. The certainty is ex- 
pressed even in this very volume of 1885. Yet his 
well-loved speculation of the Soul coming out of the 
Deep and returning to it again asked once more for 
recognition, and attained it. 

Sun and evening star. 

And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar. 

When I put out to sea, 



468 



Tennyson 



But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam. 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home. 




CHAPTER XV 



THE NATURE-POETRY 



THE love of Nature," the meaning of which term 
we understand without explanation, has reached 
its greatest and most various development in the 
nineteenth century. It had always been a part of an 
artist's soul among the Aryan families of the earth, but 
in these last hundred years Nature has risen almost into 
an equality with humanity as a subject of art. In our 
own country. Turner, during a long life, shaped into thou- 
sands of pictures, drawings, and studies, the impressions 
he received from solitary Nature, and with a passion 
which, changing its methods year by year, never changed 
its intensity. And he was only the greatest of a host of 
painters who have, in solitary love of Nature for her 
own sake, recorded her doings and her feelings with an 
intimacy, affection, and joy which has been as eager and 
as productive in France as in England. The musicians 
were not apart from this movement. We know from 
their letters and books that they composed a great num- 
ber of pieces for the express purpose of recording all 

469 



470 Tennyson 



they felt in the presence of Nature, and when alone with 
her. The prose-writers of fiction and fancy gave them- 
selves up almost too much to natural description ; and 
many books exist which are nothing more than emo- 
tional statements of the profound love of their writers 
for Nature in her solitudes. The poets were not, of 
course, behindhand. England, France, Germany, Italy, 
Spain, but chiefly the three first, were driven to express 
this love of Nature when they were isolated with her as 
a bridegroom with a bride. 

Wordsworth was the first to lift this love of Nature 
for her own sake into a worship ; and it passed on, re- 
ceiving no less incense, to Walter Scott and Byron, to 
Shelley and Keats. It exists, undiminished, in Brown- 
ing, in Swinburne, and Morris, and in a host of other 
poets whose names we need not here recall. Each of 
these had his own special way of feeling the beauty of 
the natural world, and his own manner of representing 
it, but the lonely love they all felt was the steady ele- 
ment underneath their individual forms of expression. 
Tennyson had his own method, and it was different 
from that of all the others. It differed curiously, and 
the results to which we are led, when we consider it, 
are curious. 

Mainly speaking, that difference consists in the ab- 
sence from his mind of any belief or conception of a 
life in N^iture. He described Nature, on the whole, as 
she was to his senses, as she appeared on the outside. 
He did it with extraordinary skill, observation, accuracy, 



The Nature- Poetry 471 

and magnificence ; and we are full of delight with this 
work of his. I have dwelt on it from poem to poem, 
and I hope I have succeeded in making clear my full 
admiration of its power, beauty, variety, and range. But 
when we have done all this, and think less of particular 
descriptions, and more of the whole impression made 
by his work on Nature, we are surprised to find that our 
interest in Tennyson's poetry of natural description is 
more intellectual than emotional. We ask why, and the 
answer is, — He did not conceive of Nature as alive. He 
did not love her as a living Being. 

Again, when we read his natural descriptions, we find 
them drenched with humanity. It is impossible, save 
very rarely, to get away in them from the sorrows, or 
the joys of man. But when we do not meet with hu- 
manity in his landscape, the landscape by itself is cold. 
It rarely has any sentiment of its own. The sentiment 
in it is imposed upon it by the human soul ; so that, at 
last, we are driven to say : " On the whole, this poet 
did not care much to be alone with Nature, and did 
not love her dearly for her own sake. And this is 
strange ; it is unlike any other great poet of this century." 

These are the two curious wants in his poetry of 
Nature, and I believe I can make most clear how he 
differed from the other poets by describing their position 
towards Nature in contrast with his own. 

I take Wordsworth first. I need not say too much 
about his view of Nature. I have written of it elsewhere, 
and many others have also dwelt upon it. But, largely 



472 Tennyson 



speaking, he believed within his poetic self that Nature 
was alive in every vein of her ; thought, loved, felt, 
and enjoyed in her own way, not in a way the same 
as we, but in a similar way, so similar that we could 
communicate with her and she with us, as one spirit can 
communicate with another. There is a sympathy be- 
tween us ; but there is this difference, that, with few 
exceptions, she is the giver and we the receiver. Then. 
what is true of the whole of Nature is true of the parts. 
Every flower, cloud, bird and beast, every mountain, 
wood, and every tree, every stream, the great sky and the 
mighty being of the ocean, shared in the life of the 
whole, and made it, in themselves, a particular life. Each 
of them enjoyed, felt, loved, thought, in its own fashion 
and in a different fashion from the rest. Each of them 
could send its own special life to us men, as well as to 
one another ; could give us sympathy and receive our 
gratitude. This was no mere dream, it was a reality 
to Wordsworth. It is not the fancy of a lover of his, 
gathered from poetic phrases in his work, nor is it an 
impossible philosophy. No one can say that it may 
not be true. It cannot be proved, indeed, but it 
cannot be disproved. He lays it down in clear 
form at the end of The Recluse as a theory which 
is at the base of all his poetry of Nature and Man. 
There is a pre-arranged harmony, he says, between 
man's mind and the natural world which fits them to 
one another, which enables them to wed one another ; 
and the philosophic ground of this theory is that both 



J 



The Nature- Poetry 473 

Nature and Man, being alike from God, and existing 
together in God, are capable, when separated from one 
another in this phenomenal world, of coming together 
again, and finding themselves to be consciously in a 
union, one with another, of mutual joy and consolation. 
This was the philosophic conception in the realm of 
which he always lived. Imagination took it up, and 
clothed it with glory and honour, and put into it an eager 
heart of life, so that Nature was his dearest friend, and 
all its motions in all things his passionate delight. Wher- 
ever he went, he had perfect companions, and each of 
them had something new to say. Wherever he went, he 
saw all things in an intercommunion, the love of which, 
being given and received, made the majesty, beauty, and 
harmony of the universe ; and the sight filled him with 
incommunicable rapture. And this intercommunion was 
of life with life. In one word, every distinct thing in 
Nature had a soul of its own. He seems to have gone 
even further. Every place — with all the separate lives 
which belonged to its flowers, clouds, stones, lakes, 
streams, and trees — had, over and above these lives, a 
collective life of its own. Hence such phrases as " the 
souls of lonely places." And, finally, all the souls of 
these separate places and of all their separate objects, 
together ran up into the Spirit of the Earth, and then 
into the One Spirit of the Universe. 

Shelley (without Wordsworth's quasi-philosophic 
ground for his belief ) held at root the same idea that 
Wordsworth held — that all the universe was alive, and 



474 Tennyson 



that every part of it had its own particular life in the 
whole. He represented this vast Being in the Asia of 
\}\Q Prometheus Unbound. " Life of life," he calls her, in 
the Hymn of all her nymphs. She is the vital Love 
which makes the life of the universe. She pervades 
every part of the animate and the so-called inanimate 
creation, making in everything a living spirit which lives 
its own life and loves in its own way ; so that every in- 
visible molecule of vapour sucked by the sun from ocean 
or the forest-pool has its own delightful indweller. Prac- 
tically speaking, this is a view of Nature equivalent to 
Wordsworth's, only that which Wordsworth conceived 
as Thought evolving in life, Shelley conceived as Love 
evolving in life. 

The love whose smile kindles the universe, 
The beauty in which all things live and move. 

Shelley then sets man, if he would escape from the dark- 
ness of sense, face to face with a living world, whose joy 
he might see, whose sympathy he might claim, whose 
life he might share, and whose life was love. 

Had Tennyson any conception of this kind held, with 
certain differences, by these two poets with regard to 
Nature ? Did he conceive of an active life in the nat- 
ural world and its parts ? Does his Nature breathe, enjoy, 
and love ? Can we feel a personal affection for it, or believe 
that it gives some affection back to us, or that it is, with us, 
a vital part of a universal love, or a universal thought ? 



The Nature-Poetry 475 

I do not think, save in a few indefinite touches of fancy, 
or in an isolated poem like the song of The Brook^ that 
we find any principle of this kind conceived by Tenny- 
son, or embodied in his Nature-poetry. His natural 
world is not of itself alive ; nor has it anything to do 
with us of its own accord. It is beautiful and sublime ; 
we can feel for it admiration or awe ; but it sends 
nothing of itself to us. It is the world of the imagi- 
native scientific man, who has an eye for beauty, and a 
heart to feel it. Matter is matter to Tennyson, though 
no doubt he often thought of it as having no absolute 
existence. But he saw it, when he described it, in its 
existence to us, and in that relative existence he felt no 
conscious life in it. 

There is, then, in his poetry of Nature an entire absence 
of that happy union of heart to heart which we feel 
established between us and Nature when we read the 
poetry of Wordsworth or Shelley. Tennyson, so far as 
Nature is concerned, is not our beloved companion in 
the lonely places of the hills, in the woods, beside the 
stream, near the great sea, or when we watch the moving 
sky. We can read him in these places with pleasure, if 
we read him for his records of humanity, for their pathos 
or their joy ; but we do not read him if we wish to 
escape from humanity and to live with Nature alone. 
There is no warmth, no life, no love in his Nature. His 
descriptions of what he sees of the outside of the world 
are luminous and true, but he does not pierce below the 
surface of phenomena to a living soul in the universe 



476 Tennyson 



that enjoys its own life, and can send that life to meet 
our own. 

" So much the better," many persons will say. " There 
is no living soul in Nature. These are the dreams of a 
certain class of poets, and we welcome Tennyson, who 
describes things as they are with beauty and with 
clearness." Well, I have no quarrel with these 
persons. It is delightful to read Tennyson's natural 
descriptions, and I have shown in this book that I enjoy, 
admire, and honour them. I can even endure to be 
told that he took care, as in that description of the 
cove at Tintagil, that everything he said wondrously of 
the waves was yet scientifically true — as if that mattered 
in poetry. All I desire to say is, that this way of look- 
ing at and feeling Nature is not the way of the other poets 
of this century, whose dreams were to them realities, 
and who loved Nature, not as a picture, which was 
Tennyson's way, but as a living being. 

Again, when we take Coleridge, we are also in contact 
with a theory which gave a life to Nature, so that we 
could feel in it a spirit which answered to our own. 
Nature was not, in his poetry, separate from us, as 
Wordsworth and Shelley held ; Nature was ourselves. 
The apparent world was but the image of our own 
thoughts. But those thoughts, and therefore the apparent 
world, were part of the life of the great Spirit. In Him 
we and the universe were both alive. 

O the one life within us and abroad 

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul ! 



The Nature-Poetry 477 

We give, that is, its life to the universe. What answers 
from it to us is life, but it is our own. When we are 
dull and dead of heart we get nothing back : 

I may not hope from outward forms to win 

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. 

And then occurs this famous passage in which what he 
thinks is so clear that to read it is to understand : 

O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 

And in our life alone does Nature live ; 

Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud ! 

And would we aught behold, of higher worth, 
Than that inanimate cold world allowed 
To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd. 

Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth 
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 

Enveloping the Earth — 
And from the soul itself must there be sent 

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, 
Of all sweet sounds the life and element ! 

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud — 

We in ourselves rejoice ! 
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, 

All melodies the echoes of that voice, 
All colours a suffusion from that light. 

It is plain from these lines that Nature lived to Cole- 
ridge because he lived. The universe breathed with our 
being, and we loved in it the Life of God which was in 
ourselves. Coleridge never, then, describes Nature from 
the outside, as if it were a mere picture. 

Had Tennyson any notion of this kind with regard to 



47B Tennyson 

the natural world ? Now and again he seems to ap- 
proach it, but he does not grasp it as a faith. In his 
poem, The Higher Pantheism^ he thinks of the universe 
as a Vision. But the vision is distorted, imperfect, and 
out of gear, because we are distorted, imperfect, out of 
gear. If we could get right and straight, that which we 
perceive would seem perfect, as it really is. For " That 
vision — is it not He ? " This dim, distorted theory — as 
contorted in itself as it makes the universe of Nature be 
to us — might be brought into some relation to the theory 
of Coleridge, but it is better to pass it by, as Tennyson 
practically did. It had no direct influence over his 
natural description. It leaves his Nature lifeless. 

This theory would not, perhaps, have left Nature life- 
less to him, if he could have fully believed it. But he 
left it as a suggestion. It was a question he addressed 
to us and the universe — " This vision — is it not He ? " 
and to this question he had no clear answer to give. 
There is something, he thought, below the appearance 
of Nature, but what it is we can only guess ; and it may 
be something absolutely different from what we per- 
ceive the universe to be, or what we imagine to underlie 
our perception of it. ^He believes that the life of God 
is there, but what we see and feel in Nature tells us 
nothing true about that life. We only see that dis- 
torted image of it which is mirrored by our imperfec- 
tion. Hence, even when Tennyson wrote about Nature 
within this quasi-pantheistic theory, he could not feel 
any love for her, nor attribute any life to her, because 



The Nature- Poetry 479 

she was only a false picture of the true world. But he 
could describe what he perceived ; and he chose out of 
all he perceived that which he thought beautiful, and 
drew it as it was to the senses, not to the soul ; as 
lifeless matter, not as living spirit. 

There is another little poem concerning this super- 
sensuous, unattainable secret which is hidden below 
phenomena, and which is contained in full in every 
separate part of the whole : 

Flower in the crannied wall, 

I pluck you out of the crannies, 

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 

Little flower — but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

I should know what God and man is. 

Yes, I daresay ; but this sceptical position of mind 
towards Nature, this demand to understand, prevented 
him, as a poet, from feeling any soul in the universe. 
He spoke of things only as he saw them. He said, I 
repeat, exactly what the scientific man, with an eye for 
beauty, would wish to be said about Nature. The de- 
scriptions then are vivid, accurate, lovely on the out- 
side, but cold. They have no voice of love or comfort 
for the heart of man. When I say this, I apply it only 
to his descriptions of Nature apart from humanity, of 
Nature by herself. When he mingles up human life 
with Nature, then his descriptions of her seem warm. 
But it is the human sentiment transferred to Nature 
which warms her. By herself, in the poetry of Tenny- 



480 Tennyson 



son she remains without any sympathy of her own 
for us, 

I turn now to Walter Scott and Byron, and contrast 
them as Nature-poets with Tennyson. Neither of them 
had any of these half-philosophic views of Nature, but 
they had a lively delight in the natural world for its 
own sake, and in isolation from humanity. They could 
spend hour after hour alone in the wild land, thankful 
that man did not intrude upon them, and satisfied to 
the heart with the beauty of solitary Nature. In the 
midst of his story of The Lady of the Lake or of Rokeby\ 
Scott rejoices to sever himself from his human tale, and 
to describe for his own special pleasure the islands of 
Loch Katrine and the narrow pass which led to them, 
or the glens of the Greta and the Tees, as if there was 
nothing else in all the world for which he cared. 

Byron has the same solitary pleasure in Nature, the 
same love of her for her own sake, apart from man. It 
is the only joy left to Manfred, who spends hours alone 
among the icy splendours of the Alps, and loves to talk 
with the witch of the torrent when he most hates to talk 
with man. Byron rejoices everywhere in his poetry to 
lose humanity in Nature. The verse I quote from 
Childe Harold paints this part of his poetic life ; 



To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, 
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene, 

Where things that own not man's dominion dwell, 
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been ; 
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen. 



The Nature-Poetry 481 

With the wild flock that never needs a fold ; 

Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean — 
This is not solitude, *t is but to hold 
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores 
unroll'd. 

There is none of this lonely joy in Nature in the poetry 
of Tennyson. Man — other men, or himself — always 
intrudes. Some friend steps in, some human event that 
has been in the place, some human passion which the 
scene illustrates. Tennyson must have his man. He is 
half afraid to be with Nature alone ; at least he has no 
satisfaction till he can people his solitude. I scarcely 
remember a single description of Nature for her own 
sake, and alone, in Tennyson ; and this also divides him 
from all the other poets of this century. We lose, then, 
in him that which we still love — solitary communion with 
Nature away from humanity. That deliverance from 
our trouble, and the world's, is not supplied to us by 
our poet. We are kept close to the weariness of being 
always with mankind. I do not say it is not good for us ; 
no doubt it is. But for all that, we, who desire a holi- 
day at times from the vast disorder and sorrow of human 
life, fall back with a sigh of pleasure on Wordsworth or 
Scott, on Shelley, or even on Byron ; and live alone with 
Nature. 

As to Keats, he has no theory of one universal 
Thought or Love pervading Nature with life, like 
Wordsworth or Shelley, but he does delight (and espe- 
cially in his first poems before Endymioii) in Nature 

for her own solitary sake, like Scott or Byron. He 
31 



482 Tennyson 



sits down in a lonely place and paints it piece by piece 
with the most observant joy, and neither his own 
humanity nor that of others disturbs the scene. But he 
also has a view with regard to Nature which goes beyond 
that of Byron or Walter Scott, and which, though it is 
quite unlike that of Wordsworth or Shelley, has this 
in common with their view — that it bestows an actual 
life on Nature. He borrows his belief from the Greek 
mythology. The Greek did not say that the stream was 
alive, or the tree — but he did say that a living being. 
Naiad or Nymph, lived in the stream or in the tree, 
and was bound up with them. This was re-introduced 
into English poetry by Keats, and it lifted his Nature 
out of death into life. The whole material world, at 
every part of it, was peopled by living beings who spoke 
to us out of the waves of the sea, and the trees of the 
wood, and the flowers of the hills, out of the mountains 
and the streams. The beauty and glory of the universe 
was the beauty and glory of life. Hence he had a 
more intimate sense of loveliness in Nature than either 
Scott or Byron, and a simpler sense of her life than 
either Shelley or Wordsworth. And this life was 
sympathetic with our life. These living beings could 
communicate with us ; they had something of human- 
ity in them ; but without our sense of sin, and 
without our weariness. Even of this kind of life 
in Nature Tennyson has nothing. He does not even 
deviate into it in the classical poems. He had not 
even Plato's tolerance for these pretty myths, nor his 



The Nature-Poetry 483 

appreciation of their charm. A tree is a tree to him, a 
flower a flower, and nothing more. They are so and so, 
he says, and he describes them as lovely forms of 
matter, or of what seems so to us. He tells beautifully 
how they seem to his eyes, with great and delightful 
power, but that is all he does ; and we desire something 
more, something which will leave us '' less forlorn " in 
Nature. We want to touch life and feel it replying to 
our life, 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

This is the main statement, and it seems to me true. 
Individual lines or short passages might be brought 
forward from which we might infer that he now and 
then touched some view which thought of a living 
Nature. But this is only momentary, and he drifts 
within a few pages into another view, and then into 
another view. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Keats, 
Shelley had each of them one clear conception of 
Nature ; and all the natural description of each was influ- 
enced and ruled by the special view held by each of them. 
Tennyson wavered from view to view. Sometimes he 
seems to hold that God is full master of the universe. 
Then he slips in another place into the view that Nature 
may be partly in the hands of an evil power and its cruel 
will. Sometimes he seems to think that Nature is the 
image our distorted perceptions make of a divine order 
and beauty which may be spiritual, or may be material ; 
sometimes that she is the form Thought takes to us, and 



484 Tennyson 



therefore immaterial ; sometimes that she is nothing but 
matter, nothing more than the scientific materialist 
declares her to be. But none of these views are fixed ; 
no single one of them is chosen and believed. They 
run in and out of one another. He wavers incessantly, 
like the pure sceptic, and the result is that all he says 
about Nature by herself makes no unity of impression 
upon thought. 

What is fixed, what is clear, what does emerge in his 
poetry, after all these philosophic views have been 
played with, is Nature as she appears to the senses, the 
material world in all its variety, beauty, and sublimity, 
seen as it is on the outside. " Let me tell," he thinks, 
" beautifully and truly the facts. I see nothing cer- 
tainly but forms, and these I will describe." And 
these he does describe, with an accuracy unparalleled 
by any other English poet, and with a wonderful beauty 
and finish of words. 

This is the influence of his scientific reading upon 
him, or rather of the scientific trend of thought during 
the years in which he wrote his chief poems. His Nature- 
poetry was materialised ; it never suggests a life in 
Nature ; and it is probably owing to his not feeling any- 
thing in Nature which spoke to him — soul to soul — that 
he did not, after his earlier poems, ever appear to love 
Nature for her own sake, or care to live with her alone. 
By herself, she was not sufficient for him. In fact, I 
do not think that I am exaggerating when I say that 
the Nature-poetry of this century, which was founded 



The Nature-Poetry 485 

either on the conception of a life in Nature, or on en- 
joyment of her beauty and sublimity for her own sake 
alone, without any admixture of humanity, is not at all 
represented in Tennyson. Its decay in him makes his 
position in the history of the modern poetry of Nature 
of great interest. Moreover, that he naturally took a 
line on this matter of Nature which was new, and which 
on the whole harmonised with a time given up to the 
scientific view of the outward world, marks out, not 
only his keen individuality, but his original genius. 

Of course this says that there is no sentiment in 
Tennyson's description of Nature — and this is true 
when he is describing Nature alone, as she is in her- 
self. It is not true when he introduces humanity into 
the scene. Then he groups Nature round the feelings 
of men and women, and the human sentiment is re- 
flected on the physical world. Or he takes Nature up 
into the life and heart of man, and, in illustrating man 
by Nature, colours Nature by human feeling ; or he 
composes a Nature in harmony with his own moods and 
those of his personages, and this composed Nature is 
really humanity. In all these ways Nature is made 
full of sentiment. And the work he has thus done on 
her is most lovely, far lovelier than his painting, beauti- 
ful as it is, of natural things by themselves in lucid 
words and with exquisite care. But the whole body of 
sentiment which then flows through the natural world is 
human, and only human. It is associated with the land- 
scape. It does not come out of Nature herself — as it 



486 Tennyson 



would have done in the writings of Wordsworth or 
Scott or Byron or Shelley or Keats. 

That distinctiveness, however, makes us only the 
more eager to feel the humanised Nature of Tennyson, 
and to get from it the pleasure that it gives. It is a dif- 
ferent kind of pleasure from that given to us by the 
other poets in regard of Nature ; or rather, the kind of 
beauty which gives that pleasure was more fully wrought 
out by Tennyson than by any of the others. We are 
charmed, then, by his Nature-poetry when it is human- 
ised, or when we wish to remember ourselves in the 
midst of Nature. But when we wish to get rid of hu- 
manity and to get rid of self-consciousness, to touch a 
Soul in Nature, to feel her life beat on our life, to love 
her for herself alone, in her solitudes — we find nothing 
in Tennyson to help us. We are forced back by his 
Nature-poetry either into human life, or into the world 
of mere phenomena. 



^^^^& 




CHAPTER XVI 



THE LATER POEMS 



IT is not an infrequent habit of an artist to try over 
again in old age the kinds of work which pleased 
his youth. This is his way of re-living the days 
when he was young. Other men do this in the silence 
of memory. The artist does it in work ; and I may 
gather within this simple framework the greater number 
of those later poems of Tennyson which reach a high 
excellence, or have a special quality. He reverted to his 
classical, romantic, and theological interests. He felt 
over again the poetic sentiment of friendship which was 
a characteristic mark of his youthful poetry, but he felt 
it with a natural difference. He felt over again in 
memory, and reproduced, also with the natural differ- 
ence, the imaginative ardour of a youth for Nature 
and love 

When all the secret of the Spring, 
Moves in the chambers of the blood ; 

And, lastly, he returned, and with extraordinary force, 

487 



488 Tennyson 



in Merlin and the Gleam^ to that pursuit of the ideal 
perfection, of the undiscovered land, which in ancient 
times he had expressed in the Ulysses. 

First, then, with regard to his interest in classic sub- 
jects and the classical poets, he felt again the impulse 
which long ago produced (Enone and Tithonus^ and 
shaped it now into The Death of (Enone^ and, perhaps, 
into Demeter and Persephone. I have already treated 
of those poems, and need not touch them again. But 
something yet remains to be said, in general terms, 
about his imitations and translations of the classic poets, 
and of the affection and the praise he gave them. These 
great masters of idea and form, that is, of intellect and 
beauty, were his daily companions. 

The elements derived from this life-long association 
with the Greek and Roman poets appear in his earliest 
poems and move like leaven through the whole of his 
work. They add to the dignity of his poetry ; they 
bring to it a clear, reflective grace ; often an old-world 
charm, as when some pure classic phrase carries with it 
suddenly into an English poem a breath, an odour of 
Pagan loveliness. He derives from them a sculptur- 
esque manner in verse which often reminds me of the 
limbs and of the drapery of the figures in the Elgin 
marbles ; and to their influence are due his desire and 
his power to see clearly and to describe with lucid 
accuracy things as they appear, both in human life and 
in nature, and to trust to this for his effects, rather than 
to any pathetic fallacies. These, and other qualities 



The Later Poems 489 

naturally accordant with them, were not created in him 
by the classics, but were educated, even awakened, in 
him by them. The curious thing which I seem to de- 
tect in his writings, and which is quite in harmony with 
his unmixed English nature, is that he is much more in 
sympathy with Latin than with Greek poets, much more 
at one with the genius of Rome than of Athens. 

That tendency to over-conciseness, which in his 
dramas often reaches baldness, may have its root in an 
admiration of the Latin brevity of phrase. But the Latin 
language, as a vehicle of expression, did not lose soft grace 
or suggestion of ornament in the concise phrase. The 
English language, on the contrary, owing probably to the 
loss of its inflections, demands more expansion than the 
Latin, and when its poetic phrases are pared down to the 
brevity of Latin, they tend to become too austere, too 
abrupt, too squat, for poetry. Such conciseness does not 
afford room enough for pleasurable and fitting ornament ; 
the imagination cannot indulge in delightful play or 
colour. Beauty does not live and change from point to 
point of the compressed verse, nor thrill along its move- 
ment. 

Tennyson indeed was not without these sweet graces. 
His early work, as well as In Memoriam, Maud, The 
Princess^ and his lyrics, are rich with tender ornament. 
I only wish to say that he tended to reduce his orna- 
ment too much, as other poets tend to increase it too 
much. And he sometimes grew cold and naked, so that 
on the whole we may say of him that he has less of orna- 



490 Tennyson 



ment and imaginative play and soft changes than the 
other poets of this century. Nearly all his dramatic 
work, for example, has this rigidity, this want of versa- 
tility and phantasy and self-delight. 

When Tennyson wrote in this fashion, his verse re- 
sembles Norman architecture in a village church. It 
has power, it often fits the subject well, and there is a 
certain beauty in it ; but it would have had as much 
power, as much fitness, and far more beauty, had it re- 
sembled the Gothic of the thirteenth century, and been 
more interesting from verse to verse with lovely orna- 
ment, with freer and more gracious invention of detail. 
This tendency to austerity, to a certain rudeness or a 
certain over-fineness (the two things often go together), 
to wide spaces devoid of ornament, is partly due, I think, 
to his fondness for Latin forms. The Greeks did not 
suffer from this over-polish, this beating down of im- 
pulse, this educated severity, and necessarily this want 
of freedom. Tennyson would have been at all points 
an even greater poet than he was if he had loved Greece 
more and Rome less. The natural liberty, the bold 
invention, the swift following of native impulse within 
well-defined but wide limits of law, the fearlessness 
which felt that beauty was always right, all of which 
marked Greek poetry, were not as fully Tennyson's as 
they might have been. He frequently pulled too hard at 
the reins he fitted on Pegasus, and that soaring creature 
was a little too much subdued to the manege. His art 
was more Roman than Greek. 



The Later Poems 491 

The influence of Homer is felt throughout his heroic 
poetry, but he missed the rush of Homer's verse, its 
easy strength and freedom. He gained in his poetry a 
great deal of the Homeric simplicity, sonorousness, and 
tenderness, but he did not gain all he might of the variety, 
naturalness, and the constant entertainment which Homer 
brings to us from line to line. Moreover, that extra- 
ordinary flexibility to the world of man which belonged 
to Homer, a flexibility to every type of humanity as 
great as that of the air to the varied surface of the earth, 
was only partly possessed by Tennyson. In fact, the 
time in which he lived had too much of culture and too 
little of Nature to enable him to attain this excellence 
fully. 

He twice tried to translate Homer — two celebrated 
passages in the Iliad — and both seem to me to prove the 
un-Homeric nature of his art. They resemble failures 
more than successes, and are even less good than might 
have been made by poets very much his inferiors. Per- 
haps a great poet is specially ill-fitted (owing to his 
naturally strong individuality) for translating another 
great poet. But even granting that, these translations 
are overcarefully wrought, their art is too self-conscious, 
they have no gallop in them, and the sentiment of the 
original has evaporated. So strong is the Tennysonian 
style, that Homer is changed into Tennyson. Some of 
this failure is owing to the vehicle he chose. Of all forms 
of possible English verse, blank verse is the least fitted 
to represent the Homeric hexameter. It wants especially 



492 Tennyson 



that shout of the long syllable of the final dactyl which 
above everything else gives its leap and cry and force to 
the Homeric line, and sends it rushing to its close like 
the steeds of Achilles to battle. 

These Homeric translations were the only translations 
he ever published. But he did try to reproduce some of 
the classic metres in English, and succeeded as well as 
others, so far as the metres are concerned, and better 
than others, so far as the usage of words is concerned. 
The poem written in alcaics to Milton is a beautiful, 
brilliant, sound-changing, and harmonic thing. But it is 
English in note. Tennyson never imitated ; in all he 
did he was English and himself. Though he loved, as 
I said, the Latin conciseness, he never wrote in the 
manner of the Latin poets. The literary movement of 
Lucretius^ though the poem is Roman in feeling to the 
backbone, is English, as it ought to be, not Lucretian. 

Again, Virgil had more influence over him than Homer ; 
we feel the power and the delicacy of this master in 
Tennyson's poetry, not in imitation, but as a controlling 
influence towards soft precision of phrase ; but had he 
tried to translate Virgil he would have entirely failed. 
There was a rude Anglo-Saxon element in him which 
Virgil could not have endured, and which would have, 
in spite of every care, burst out of his character into 
such a translation, and lowered the Virgilian grace. It 
may have been owing to that native roughness that he 
admired Virgil so much. In these later poems he wrote 
the praise of Virgil for the Mantuans, a homage he did 



The Later Poems 493 



not pay to Homer. Old age had increased his enjoy- 
ment of a poet he had loved when a boy. The varied 
kinds of Virgil's work, his subtle excellences, even his 
twofold relation to humanity, are expressed with a beauty 
and truth the critics might envy. 

All the charm of all the Muses 

often flowering in a lonely word 

fully enshrines what the happy fanatic of Virgil rejoices 
to have said for him. " I that loved thee," he cries, 
" since my day began, 

Wielder of the stateliest measure 

ever moulded by the lips of man." 

" Stateliest measure," says, it seems, too much, and so does 
" ocean-roll of rhythm." Virgil's verse is not the state- 
liest, and the roll of ocean is stronger than his rhythm ; 
but if the phrases suggest that Tennyson lost some of 
his judgment in admiration, we like him the more be- 
cause of that. The praise also that he gives is expressed 
with that full mouth of song which is so rare in an old 
man's work. A line like this that I quote is like summer 
itself in the golden age — 

Summers of the snakeless meadow, 

unlaborious earth and oarless sea. 

Nor are these lines less noble which tell of the everlasting 
power of Virgil, whose imperial verse shall live when 
empires are like the phantoms through whom JEnedS 
went, bearing the branch of gold : 



494 Tennyson 



Light among the vanish'd ages ; 

star that gildest yet this phantom shore ; 
Golden branch amid the shadows, 

kings and realms that pass to rise no more. 

Then, too, Catullus, as well as Virgil, engaged his 
heart. He had endeavoured in time past after the metre 
Catullus used to the despair of his peers — " so fan- 
tastical is the dainty metre." But now, in his old age, 
he passed from the metre to the spirit of that poet, and 
felt over again, and with his own tenderness, and in the 
lovely place where the Latin singer sometimes dwelt, 
the softly-raining tenderness of Catullus for those he 
loved. Frater Ave atque Vale, he cried among the olive 
terraces of Sirmione. For these, then, for Virgil, Catul- 
lus, even for Lucretius, he was more fit comrade than 
for Homer. Art cultivated into that which is a little 
more over-refined than Nature was more to him than 
the art which itself is Nature. 

Next, Tennyson not only reverted to these classical 
subjects, he also reclaimed his pleasure in Romance. 
Old age, though it cannot act romance, lives all the 
more fully with it in the chambers of the heart. Its 
stories, its sentiment, far outside of the daily world 
with which the sage has long been weary, enchant the 
soul even more than in early youth. It is one of the 
worst misfortunes of an artist's old age, that his hand 
can no more express in sculpture or in painting, and his 
brain no more shape in music or in poetry, all the beauty 
which he feels. It were better perhaps that he left the 



The Later Poems 495 

shaping aside, and were content with thoughts alone and 
their emotions. But it is hard not to try, and Tennyson 
tried in The Falcon a tale of Boccaccio, and in The 
Foresters the woodland legend of Robin Hood. Both 
dramas are quite unworthy of his hand ; and when 
Oberon, Titania, and their fairies enter the groves we 
hear how sadly they have deteriorated since the days of 
Theseus. Shakspere's Oberon and Titania are royal 
personages, and, though Mustard, Pease-blossom, and 
the rest make their own jokes on Bottom, they would 
have sooner died than have called Oberon " Ob.," or 
Titania "Tit." This is the humour of The Spiiisters 
Sweet-arts imposed on Fairyland, and it is incredibly 
clumsy. 

Driven by the same feeling for Romance, he had 
already written in the volume of 1880 on an Irish tale, 
seeking all too late that plenteous fountain of imagina- 
tive work. The Voyage of Maeldune is a fine piece of 
scenic power, written with extraordinary vigour and in 
racing rhythm, but it has no soul, and is stripped clean 
of the Celtic charm and of the Celtic pathos. Tennyson 
loses all the sentiment of the original by imposing on the 
voyagers his own conception of the Irish character. 
The warriors who sail boast loudly of their descent ; 
the slightest thing flusters them with anger ; they shout, 
and hate, and wallow in flowers and tear them up in a 
blind passion, and gorge, and madden, and chant the 
glories of Finn, and fight with one another, and slay, till 
only a tithe of them return. This is the English form 



496 Tennyson 



which he gave to the story — the English pleasure in 
rough-and-tumble killing for amusement, the Anglo- 
Saxon brutality imposed upon the Irish nature. Did it 
seem to him quite impossible that sixty comrades 
should sail together and be excited by various adven- 
tures, without falling out furiously with one another? 
There is not a trace of this in the original. All are 
faithful, loving, and tender comrades. Not one of them 
acts like a drunken sailor at a Portsmouth fair. There 
is no boasting, no fighting, and no slaying. They all 
return in safety, save three, who did not belong to 
the band. A gentle air of half-religious, half-romantic 
sentiment fills the tale : and a little indignation, mixed 
with a little amusem.ent, belongs to the reader who finds 
the sorrowful romance of the story lost in the English 
rudeness. 

Indeed, all his life long, Tennyson, though he did love 
the Welsh tale of Arthur, never felt, or was capable of 
feeling, the Celtic spirit. He felt something which he 
thought was it, but it was not. The Celtic magic 
which Arnold traced in English poetry was in another 
world than Tennyson's. Other poets have the Celtic 
strain in their blood, and it passes into their song, but 
Tennyson is the unmixed English type. He is the 
poetic flowering of pure Anglo-Saxonism, the very best 
it could do alone ; and a noble, fair, and splendid flower 
it is. But he would have climbed to a higher ledge of 
Parnassus if he had been baptised in the Celtic waters. 
As it was, he was only English, and the statement 



The Later Poems 497 

accounts for many things, both good and bad, in his 
poetry, on which I need not dwell. It accounts, among 
the rest, for the Anglicising of Arthur's character and 
of his tale. A man with a grain of the Celtic nature in 
him could never have written the Idylls of the King as 
Tennyson has written it. 

Again, he reverted to his old theological interests. 
I have already shown how full he became of the ques- 
tion of Immortality. The nobly composed poem of 
Vastness is written to enforce a conclusion of the truth 
of that doctrine. Despair^ the terrible pathos of which 
he need not have lessened by an intrusion of his own 
personal wrath with those who believed in everlasting 
death or in everlasting hell, is a powerful plea for the 
immortality a God of Love would naturally secure for 
man. His poems to friends, and on the death of friends, 
are all touched with eternal hopes, with his constant cry 
— Life and Love are not worth living and loving unless 
they continue, and only in their continuance is the 
problem of earth's trouble solved. The Ancient Sage^ 
as we have seen, took up again this question, and others 
related to it — the questions of The Two Voices^ of In 
Memoria7H. 

Another poem of his, St. Telemachus, recurred to the 

same theological motive which he treated in his attack 

on asceticism in the Idylls of the King and St. Simeon 

Stylites. Let the anchorite, it says, no longer live his 

deedless life. Better be stoned to death in the Forum, 

and slay a vile custom, than pray and fast, with life, in 
32 



498 Tennyson 



the wilderness ! Fine things are in it — Rome flaring 
lurid, in the hermit's imagination, at every western sun- 
set, and calling him forth to act ; the description of the 
crowd pressing to the Coliseum, and of Telemachus 
borne along by that full stream of men, 

Like some old wreck on some indrawing wave. 

I do not know if this poem belong truly to his old age, 
but it has not the mighty grip with which Tennyson 
would have seized on such a subject in his youth and 
manhood. 

In the very last volume, this return to his early theo- 
logical interests continues. Akbars Dream records 
how, in the poet's mind, all religious differences were 
merged into one religion of goodness and love ; nor 
does the poem want phrases of force and breadth. A 
gentle air, a kindly quiet, as of one who already felt 
the soft sunlight of a higher peace than ours, broods 
over all the late religious poems. 

There is yet another matter in which an old man 
reverts to his youth ; and this is the emotional senti- 
ment of friendship. Mature manhood has not less of 
friendship than youth, but it has little time to cherish 
its sentiment. In youth it is different. We have then 
time to hover over a friendship, to prophesy about it, 
to take it with us for inward pleasure, or, if we have 
lost a friend, for sorrow of contemplation. In Memo- 
riam is full of that contemplative emotion, and Tenny- 
son was young when he began to write it. The poem 



The Later Poems 499 

entitled To y. 6"., beautiful throughout with a soft 
steadiness of chastened thought, and loveliest at its 
close, is also written in the air of this youthful sen- 
timent, but it is mingled with a wisdom rare in 
youth. 

A later kind of friendship, that of a man who has 
realised life and finds his affection deepen to his friend, 
not through imaginative feeling, but through interchange 
of character with him, and through their interest 
in humanity, breathes in the poem To the Rev. F. D. 
Maurice ; as good in its gay contented way as Milton's 
sonnets to Lawrence and to Cyriack Skinner, the note 
of which, in a different form of verse, it emulates. But 
the earlier sentiment still lives at times. It is not 
spread now over the whole of life, but arises for a brief 
period in lonely hours, and only for the dead. There 
are two poems — In the Garden at Swainston and I71 the 
Valley of Cauteretz — which touch the depths of man- 
hood's friendship in regret. 

When age comes, there is a further change. The 
sentiment of friendship is now like that felt in youth, 
but the waters from which it arises are different, and 
its horizon is also different. The work of life is over, 
and emotion, as in the days of youth, has again time 
to feel itself. Moreover, the sadness of decay, though 
it be not allowed to master the soul, yet brings an 
autumn mist over the landscape of life, in which all 
thoughts are mellowed, and lays on all its woods a 
lovely colouring, with the beauty of which the old man 



500 Tennyson 

is charmed, with which he plays, but which he knows 
is beauty that is departing. What we thus feel for our- 
selves, we feel also for our friends who have grown old 
with us. They, too, are in their Indian summer, and 
year by year the final frost, touching one or another of 
them, warns us of our own death. We cannot look for- 
ward to an enjoyment of their friendship as we did 
when we were young ; but those who believe, like 
Tennyson, in a life to come, think of friendship re- 
newed in a world where life is winterless. 

These various emotions are a new source of poetic 
impulse which, in regard of friendship, is almost more 
productive of poetry than its sentiment in youth. 
Thousands of poems have been written in their atmos- 
phere, and a collection of them — for they have a special 
quality and a unity of emotion — would be of abiding 
interest and pleasure. Some recover a little of the 
gaiety of youth ; others have a trembling pleasure, 
such as a tree all gold and crimson might have in its 
own loveliness, with the knowledge in its pleasure that 
the coming night may send the storm to strip it bare. 
But if the poet be a person of an equal mind, such 
poems have a courageous air, a kindly tolerance, a 
wisdom inwoven with love, a gratitude to life for all its 
joy, even for the strength of its sorrows ; and often a 
delightful brightness as of a veteran who has kept his 
shield in all his battles, and who waits peacefully for 
the last calling of the roll. 

Many such poems, chiefly of Dedication, occur in 



The Later Poems 501 

the later volumes of Tennyson. They ought to be 
read together when we desire to feel his grace and 
power in this special kind of poetry, which no one, I 
think, has ever done so well. They are revelations of 
character, and of a character made braver and kindlier 
by old age. No trace of cynicism deforms them, and 
their little sadness is balanced by a soft and sunny 
clearness, by tenderness in memory and magnanimity 
of hope. Each of them is also tinged with the indi- 
viduality of the person to whom it was written. The 
poems to Edward Fitzgerald, to his brother, to Mary 
Boyle, to Lord Dufferin, possess these qualities, and 
are drenched, as it were, with the dew of this delicate 
sentiment peculiar to old age. They look backward, 
therefore, but they also look forward ; and not only 
friends on earth, but those who have found their life in 
death, enter into their hour of prospect and of retrospect. 

When the dumb Hour, clothed in black, 
Brings the Dreams about my bed, 
Call me not so often back, 
Silent Voices of the dead, 
Toward the lowland ways behind me, 
And the sunlight that is gone ! 
Call me rather, silent voices, 
Forward to the starry track 
Glimmering up the heights beyond me 
On, and always on ! 

The Silent Voices, 

Again, correlative with the sentiment which inspires 
these poems, there is another kind of poetry which is 



502 Tennyson 



naturally written in old age, and recurs to those motives 
of youth which arise out of the happiness of the world 
and of the poet in the awakening of life in Spring. 
This poetry is born out of the memories of that early 
joy, and is also touched with a distinctive sentiment, 
native only to old age, delicately clear, having a breath 
of the colour and warmth of youth, and flushed with the 
hope of its re-awakening. Its poems are like those 
February days which enter from time to time into the 
wintry world, so genial in their misty sunlight that the 
earth seems then to breathe like a sleeping woman and 
her bosom to heave with a dream of coming pleasure. 
They recall the past, and prophesy the immortal. Spring. 
Old age often feels this sentiment, but is rarely able to 
shape it ; but when, by good fortune, it can be shaped, 
the poem has a unique charm. Of such poems The 
Throstle is one, and Early Spring is another. They may 
have been originally conceived, or even written, in 
earlier days, but I am sure that they were re-written in 
old age, and in its evening air. 

Lastly, there are the poems and those portions of 
poems which are inflamed with the spirit that pursues 
after the perfection of beauty. Of these Merlin and the 
Gleam is the best. It is this spirit in his work, as it is in 
the work of all great artists, which gives Tennyson his 
greatest power over the heart of humanity ; and, though 
I have dwelt on it at the beginning of this book, I can- 
not do better than dwell upon it at the end, but in a 
closer connection with his poetry. To quote all the 



The Later Poems 503 

passages which ilhistrate this temper of his would 
occupy too large a space ; but a long selection might be 
made of them, until we come to the later poems in 
which this enkindling aspiration burns with as clear a 
flame as in the days of his youth. It is even more 
ethereal, of a more subtle spirit. 

Tennyson was never content with the visible and the 
material, never enslaved by that which our world calls 
the practical. He never believed that the things of 
sense were other than illusions, which dimly represented 
or distorted the true substance of beauty that lay be- 
yond the senses. His life, like every faithful artist's life, 
was, therefore, incessant pursuit. The true device of 
the artist, as it is of the religious man in religion, is 
this : " While we look not at the things which are seen 
and temporal, but at the things which are not seen and 
eternal " ; and what the visible world said or offered to 
Tennyson, however now and then he was disturbed by 
the temporary and material, was in reality nothing to 
him. It had no influence upon his work. " Brothers, I 
count not myself to have attained, but I press forward," 
is also as much a device of the artist as it is of the saint. 
Both, in their several spheres, write that motto on their 
soul. And Tennyson never found finality in his art, 
never had any satisfaction, save for the moment of com- 
pletion, in the outward form he gave to his subject. 

It is the Idea after which the artist runs. The mo- 
ment one form of it is realised, it opens out something 
more to be pursued, and when that is seized, it dis- 



504 Tennyson 



closes, in its turn, another island on the far horizon to 
which he is bound to sail : 

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move. 

To linger in the attainable is the death of art. " Be 
perfect in love," said Jesus, " as your Father in heaven 
is perfect in love." Be perfect in beauty, he would say 
to the artist, as your Father in heaven is perfect in 
beauty. And indeed, in a wider world than ours, the 
two sayings are one, for Beauty is the form of Love. At 
this point, that word of Blake's is true : " Christianity 
is Art, and Art is Christianity." Nor in this view is 
humanity neglected, for whom the poet writes and the 
painter paints. For, since to love beauty is as ultimate 
an end for man as to love goodness and to love truth, 
the life of the artist is necessarily lived for mankind. 
There is no higher life in all the world, nor one more 
difficult and tempted. But the greatness of the strife is 
tempered by the beauty and glory of the ideal world 
in which the Maker lives, the light of which is not of the 
sun or moon, or stars, but of the central source, 

pure ethereal stream, 
Whose fountain who shall tell ! 

Tennyson had long since embodied his view of this 
world beyond the world we see, in which thought and 
feeling follow the ineffable and infinite, in his poem 
entitled The Voice and the Peak. All night the voices of 



The Later Poems 505 

the ocean and the waters of the earth cried to the silent 
peak ; and the poet asks, " Hast thou no voice, O peak ? " 
All the voices, it answers, rise and die, and I, too, shall 
fall and pass ; and the earth below me feels the desire 
of the deep and falls into it, and is no more. The out- 
ward world vanishes away. Then the poet replies : 
There is another world above the senses that dies not, 
the world of the invisible thought of man — 

The Peak is high and flush 'd 

At his highest with sunrise fire ; 
The Peak is high, and the stars are high, 

And the thought of a man is higher. 

A deep below the deep, 

And a height beyond the height I 
Our hearing is not hearing 

And our seeing is not sight. 

What is one to do who lives in this world above the 
visible, where he sees the uncreated light ? What but 
to leave all the material, and follow the far-off vision ? 
Some there are, said Tennyson in The Two Voices fifty 
years ago, 

Who, rowing hard against the stream. 
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam. 
And did not dream it was a dream. 

Later on, he threw the passion of this spiritual pursuit 
into a different form in The Voyage ; painting this aspira- 
tion in those that feel it with too much lightness of 
character, as if it were only a gay love of youth ; but 



5o6 Tennyson 



yet who never turned aside from it — the happy tribe who 
know not the unremitting strife, the serious passion, or 
the awful vision of the unapproachable loveliness, which 
are the badge and the burden of the greater artists. 

For one fair Vision ever fled 

Down the waste waters day and night, 
And still we follow'd where she led, 

In hope to gain upon her flight. 
Her face was evermore unseen, 

And fixt upon the far sea-line ; 
And each man murmur'd, " O my Queen, 

I follow till I make thee mine." 

But with Tennyson it was a far graver matter. He 
was, even to his death, the follower of the mightier 
vision, of the supernal gleam. This is the subject of a 
poem which appears in these volumes of his old age — 
Merlin and the Gleam ; as lovely in form and rhythm and 
imagination as it is noble in thought and emotion. It 
speaks to all poetic hearts in England ; it tells them of 
his coming death. It then recalls his past, his youth, 
his manhood ; his early poems, his critics, his central 
labour on Arthur's tale ; and we see through its verse 
clear into the inmost chamber of his heart. What sits 
there upon the throne ; what has always sat thereon ? 
It is the undying longing and search after the ideal light, 
the mother-passion of all the supreme artists of the 
world. " I am Merlin, who follow The Gleam." 

I know no poem of Tennyson's which more takes my 
heart with magic and beauty ; but that is a personal 
feeling, not a critical judgment. Yet how lovely, how 



1 



The Later Poems 507 



pathetic, and how noble on the old man's lips is the 
beginning : 

O young Mariner, 
You from the haven 
Under the sea-cliff, 
You that are watching 
The gray Magician 
With eyes of wonder, 
/am Merlin, 
And / am dying, 
/am Merlin 
Who follow The Gleam. 

Verse by verse we company with the poet flying forward 

to the Gleam. To pursue it is the love of life ; to die in 

its pursuit is joy, for beyond death its glory shines. 

Therefore now, on the verge of death, he gives his last 

message to the young, calling on them to follow, as he 

has done, the light that was never reached, but never 

failed ; 

And so to the land's 

Last limit I came — 

And can no longer, 

But die rejoicing, 

For thro' the Magic 

Of Him the Mighty, 

Who taught me in childhood 

There on the border 

Of boundless Ocean, 

And all but in Heaven 

Hovers The Gleam. 



Not of the sunlight, 
Not of moonlight. 



5o8 Tennyson 



Nor of the starlight ! 
O young Mariner, 
Down to the haven, 
Call your companions. 
Launch your vessel, 
And crowd your canvas, 
And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, 
After it, follow it, 
Follow The Gleam. 



Who would not wish to have written that ? Who would 
not wish to have so lived as to be able to leave that last 
impulse to the young, to cry in death that prophet-cry ! 
It is a cry all the more forcible on his lips because, with 
all this passion for the ideal, he kept so close to the 
actual life of men, clinging as intimately to the common 
thoughts and feelings of his time, so far as his range 
permitted, as the grass to the varied surface of the earth. 
But dear as the real was to him, the ideal was dearer 
still. 

These then are the things I have tried to say of his 
work in old age. And now, having walked so long with 
a great poet, it is hard to part from him. We have 
lived in a large and varied world, with its own land- 
scape and its own indwellers ; no transient world, 
reflecting as in a bubble of air the passions and follies, 
the tendencies and the knowledge of the hour, but a 
solid sphere built slowly during a lifetime into form. 
Forty years of creation were given to make this new 
country of the imagination, which men will visit, and in 
which they will wander with pleasure, while humanity 



The Later Poems 509 

endures. Every one who in the centuries to come shall 
spend therein his leisure will leave it and return to his 
daily work, consoled and cheered, more wise and more 
loving, less weary and heavy-laden, nearer to beauty and 
to righteousness, more inspired and more exalted. The 
permanence of the work of Tennyson is secure. Few 
are his failures, many hi3 successes ; and I trust that 
this study of him will make men who love him love him 
more, and those who do not yet love him find that 
constant pleasure. 





INDEX 



OF PASSAGES RELATING TO POEMS 

Achilles over the Trench, 492 

Adeline, 62 

Akbar's Dream, 498 

Ancient Sage, The, 454 «., 456-459, 463-465, 497 

Arabian Nights, Recollections of the, 64, 66 

Audley Court, loi, 104, 393 

Aylmer s Field, 230, 392, 412-419, 462 

Balin and Balan, 291-297 

Boadicea, 403 

"Break, break, break," loi, 197 

" Britons, guard your own," 231 

Brook, The, 76, 92, 229, 392, 425-430, 475 

By an Evolutionist, 29, 467 

Character, A, 75 

Charge of the Light Brigade, The, 35, 234, 237 

Charge of the Heavy Brigade, The, 235 

Claribel, 62 

Columbus, 406 

" Come not when I am dead," 100 

Coming of Arthur, The, 259-260, 268-275, 452 

Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind, Supposed, 26, 61 

Crossing the Bar, 29, 467 

511 



512 Index 

Daisy, The, 79 

Dawn, The, 47 

Day-Dream, The, 96 

Death of CEnone, The, 142-144, 488 

Death of the Duke of Wellington, Ode on the, 231-234 

Defence of Lucknow, The, 35, 236 

Demeter and Persephone, 139-141, 488 

De Profundis, 4, 449, 453-455 

Despair, 9, 28, 408, 436, 497 

Dora, 76, 92, 1 01, 230, 394-396 

Doubt and Prayer, 30 

Dramas, The, 432-436, 489 

The Falcon, 495 

The Foresters, 495 

The Promise of May, 9, 29, 463 
Dreamer, The, 30 

Dufferin and Ava, To the Marquis of, 501 
Dying Swan, The, 64 

Eagle, The, 411 

Early Spring, 502 

Edward Gray, 100 

Edwin Morris ; or, the Lake, loi, 169 

English War-song, 62 

Enoch Arden, 76, 92, 230, 392-403, 412, 413, 414, 462 

Evolutionist, By an, 20 467 

Faith, 30 

Falcon, The, 495 

" Far, far away," 457 

Fatima, 201 

First Quarrel, The, 436 

Fitzgerald, To E., 501 

" Flower in the crannied wall," 479 

Foresters, The, 495 

Frater Ave atque Vale, 494 

Gardener's Daughter, The, 76, 92, 94, 102-103, 297, 392, 427 
Gareth and Lynette, 275-282 



Index 513 



Gerairt and Enid, 282-291 / 

God and the Universe, 30 

Golden Supper, The, 57 

Golden Year, The, loi, 393 

Grandmother, The, 230, 427 

Guinevere, 357-370 

"Hands All Round," 231 
Happy, 460 n. 
Higher Pantheism, The, 478 
Holy Grail, The, 150, 319-336 

Idylls of the King, 19, 50, 76, 85, 118, 130, 145, 146, 255-268, 497 
The Coming of Arthur, 259-260, 268-275, 452 
Gareth and Lynette, 275-282 
The Marriage of Geraint 



282-291 
Geraint and Enid ) 

Balin and Balan, 291-297 

Merlin and Vivien, 297-312 

Lancelot and Elaine, 312-319 

The Holy Grail, 319-336 

Pelleas and Ettarre, 336-341 

The Last Tournament, 341-350 

Guinevere, 357-370 

The Passing of Arthur, 370-391 

Lancelot, 350-357 '^- 

In Memoriam, 18, 19, 20, 26, 29, 58, 85 145, ^58-228, 332, 374, 

375, 407, 450, 452, 460, 466, 489, 497, ,^8 
In the Garden at Swainston, 499 
In the Valley of the Cauteretz, 427, 499 

J. S., To, 499 

Lady of Shalott, The, 118, 128-129, 258, 312 

Lancelot and Elaine, 312-319 

Launcelot and Guinevere, 128 

Last Tournament, The, 341-350 

Lilian, 62 

Locksley Hall, 43, 45, 47, 78, 96, 99, 104, T09, i^i, 169 



514 Index 

Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After, 436-443 

Lotos-Eaters, The, 67, 79, 110-112, 121-125 

Love and Death, 64 

Love and Duty, 96, 97. 392 

Lover's Tale, The, 57,407 

" Love thou thy land," 40, 153 

Lucretius, 136-138, 492 

Madeline, 62 

Making of Man, The, 30 

Mariana, 64, 65 

Mariana in the South, 78 

Marriage of Geraint, The, 282-291 

Mary Boyle, To, 501 

Maud, 44, 99, 105, 145, 201, 237-254, 410, 489 

Maurice, To the Rev. F. D,, 411, 499 

May Queen, The, 19, 82, 91 

Memory, Ode to, 63, 64 

Merlin and the Gleam, 74, 488, 502, 506-508 

Merlin and Vivien, 297-312 

Miller's Daughter, The, 82, 83, 91, 427 

Milton {Alcaics), 462 

Morte d' Arthur, 130-132, 258 

Mystic, The, 68 

National Song, 62 

Northern Cobbler, The, 436 

Northern Farmer, The, 230, 281, 436, 443-444 

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, 231-234 

Ode to Memory, 63, 64 

CEnone, 68, 79, 85, 110-121, 488 

(Enone, The Death of, 142-144, 488 

*' Of old sat Freedom," 40 

Oriana, 64, 65 

Out of the Deep, 4, 449, 453-455 

J 
Palace of Art, The, 65, 8o-8r, 85-90, 409 
Parnassus, 152 
Passing of Arthur, The, 370-391 



Index 515 



Pelleas and Ettarre, 336-341 

Poems of Two Brothers, 54, 55, 58 

Poet, The, 64, 70-72 \ 

Poet's Song, The, 109 

Prefatory Poem to my Brother's Sonnets, 501 

Princess, The, 36, 46, 98, 99, 104, 145-187, 270, 410, 458, 489 

Promise of May, The, 9, 29, 463 

Recollections of the Arabian Nights, 64, 66 

Revenge, The, 35, 236, 404 

Ring, The, 461 

Rizpah, 98, 436, 444-447, 461 

Sailor Boy, The, 230, 404-405 

Sea Dreams, 85, 92, 230, 392, 409, 419-425 

Sea Fairies, The, 64, 66-68, 123 

Silent Voices, The, 501 

Sir Galahad, 128, 129-130, 258, 458 

Sisters, The, 392, 459, 461-462 

Sleeping Beauty, The, 64 

Specimen of a Translation of the Iliad, 501 

Spinster's Sweet-arts, The, 437, 495 

St. Simeon Stylites, 105, 106, 294, 497 

St, Telemachus, 497 

Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind, 26, 61 

" Sweet and low," 167 

Talking Oak, The, 95 
"Tears, idle tears," 164, 165 
" The splendour falls," 167 
Third of February, The, 231 
Throstle, The, 502 
Timbuctoo, 56, 58, 63 
Tiresias, 138 

Tithonus, 68, 134-136, 488 
Translations, 492 
To E. Fitzgerald, 501 

ToJ. S., 499 

To Mary Boyle, 501 



5i6 



Ind 



P 



ex 



To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 501 

To the Rev. F. D. Maurice, 411, 499 

To Virgil, 492-494 

Two Voices, The, 4, 26, 105, 106, 451 ;/., 456, 465, 497, 505 

Ulysses, 68, 109, 125-127, 133, 134, 406, 440, 488 

Vastness, 29, 497 

Virgil, To, 492-494 

Vision of Sin, The, 26, 85, 105-109, 189 

Voice and the Peak, The, 505 

Voyage of Maeldune, The, 495, 496 

Voyage, The, 406, 407, 505 

Walking to the Mail, loi, 393 

Wellington, Ode on the Death of the Duke of, 231-234 

Wreck, The, 436 

" You ask me why, tho' ill at ease," 40 




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